There are very few very good seos in the world. There are a ton of moderately competent ones. And there are millions of dudes in their underwear, who live in their mommies basement, who do it for the guy down the street for $3 an hour. The last group reads articles from 1999 and says thing like, “Google likes keywords so let’s put the keyword you want to rank for in your site’s footer 300 times on every page.” I’m not poo pooing these underachieving ignoramuses, because most of the SEOs in the first and second group were once these assholes. The second group reads seomoz attends conferences, may do client work, and generally know what they are doing (with a few exceptions). The third group are the names you’ve heard of. These are the guys who write books, speak at conferences, produce original data sets and whose sites rank the highest for SEO keywords.
These gentlemen and gentle-ladies are often met with a bit of contempt in the SEO world. They are referred to as Conference whores, regarded as lazy asses who do nothing but get on a speaking circuit, no-talent hacks who like to write books but don’t know how to do what they claim they can do. And it’s easy to think that way. The truth is, the majority of SEO is nitty gritty, grunt work. The process is formulaic, and not very difficult.
To put it simply, most engagements go like this:
- An individual or company has a site and knows they need SEO, so they come to you and ask you what they need to do to get ranked
- You do some research, find out a little bit about their niche, come back to them with estimates and a proposal based on several data points.
- If they accept. You assess their site, recommend changes that they need to make to remove obstacles to better rankings.
- Once the changes are made, you build links…tons and tons of links.
The reality is, the first three bits of an engagement are somewhat important. On-site changes (especially title tags) can do wonders to get a site ranking. But a majority of the work, especially for competitive keywords is in the link building. So how do you build links? Basic, link building is super duper easy. It involves going to article directoreis, social bookmarking sites, link directories and getting links. No problem. High-level link building, on the other hand, is a practice in networking. To outrank other people in highly competitive niches, a site must get links from high quality sites that are, hopefully, in the same niche. The best SEOs ask the question, “how do I turn everything into a link building opportunity.”
More than that, the hardest bit of link building an SEO company/search marketing company can do is link building for themselves. Why? Because it’s time consuming. So for them, the question should be, how do I get good links so that I can rank for awesome stuff? One of the best ways to do that is to become a known enitity. If people trust you for information on SEO stuff, guess what, they’re going to link to you. Going to conferences gets you up in front of people. It goes, you go to conferences, you put your face in front of hundreds of pepole, they start to trust you, you get links, lots and lots of links. The work is minimal, the payoff can be huge. I think the one that understands the equation Life=Linkbait is Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive. Then again, I can’t believe that other SEOs haven’t figured it out.
It is all to say, go ahead and make fun of the circuit speakers. If your an SEO, and you are full up on work, then yay for you. But for those who really want to grow and build their business, the truth is, you are competing with those who are actually thinking strategically about building links. Yes, I’m saying that if you want a good, scalable way to build links, you should do that which you hate – get in front of every one, give away your secrets, speak at conferences. Yes, Give into the man, educate others, get links.
