My thoughts on Jason Calacanis’ post
First I would like to clearly say that I respect Jason Calacanis as a business leader and what he has accomplished in his career. No, don’t worry I am not going to start a bashing session about this. But I think it’s important to read between what Jason and Danny wrote about this subject.
I think Jason’s general synopsis that 90% of SEO’s are snake oil salesmen may be a little rough. Yes there are quite a few shady individuals out there. But more importantly we should clarify that large mistakes come from firms who have way too many employees and high turn over. The sales staff’ focus is to sell the customer and with sales in general a certain amount of BS is involved. As someone who really knows this process inside and out, this is not where the failure happens, the failure happens within the high turn over tech staff that is doing most of the work. When you provide the keys to your site to some kid who is fresh out of school and has optimize maybe 2 sites in total, the risk moves up.
In general my opinion is that a good SEO is one who has been optimizing sites for a period of time, hopefully a long period of time. This individual has made mistakes and has clearly learned from his or her mistakes. We can only grow in this industry by error itself. I have personally optimized 100’s upon 100’s of sites, some small and some large. But actually being in the trenches for the past 7 years has given me a leg up. Many of the top guys in the SEO industry have built names from themselves in a short period of time, and they do a great job. Thus the need of a lot of experience is not necessary, but it prepares you for sudden changes in search algorithms that can really shake up your life.
Danny was very right in his logic and reasoning around the majority of the industry. Almost everyone has good intentions and very few that are bad are still in business. A lot of us remember the trafficpower.com days, far and few between.
Now for my controversial view, when you take away the rest of the small sites out there and look at the big bad boys. The landscape of knowledgeable people changes dramatically. To optimize a large high trafficked website requires a dramatically different thinking process. Yes all the same practices apply, but how do you get the search engine to like all 100 million pages? This is where I feel there are a lot of snake oil firms selling. Most large SEO firms CANNOT handle ultra sized websites.
Most commonly the first things a person will experience working with a large company is all of the red tape and road blocks. It takes a lot of one on one time with the engineering staff and the capability of drawing ideas out of their staff. If you cannot get them on your side, you are sunk and the project will fail!
Of the consultants that I know in the industry, the only ones that I would throw at a large company are Joseph Morin, Rand Fishkin and Andy Beal. I have seen their reactions and how they present themselves in such a manner that can be conducive of a productive meeting. I am sure there are many others out there that I do not know, and forgive me for not mentioning you. People, who know me, also know I will never recommend anyone that I wouldn’t use myself.
Yes, I tend to write in a very scattered way, so I will say in short. I think Jason’s comments where a bit too generalized and Danny made it clear. But there is a difference between a standard SEO and a fortune 500 SEO.
I think Jason’s general synopsis that 90% of SEO’s are snake oil salesmen may be a little rough. Yes there are quite a few shady individuals out there. But more importantly we should clarify that large mistakes come from firms who have way too many employees and high turn over. The sales staff’ focus is to sell the customer and with sales in general a certain amount of BS is involved. As someone who really knows this process inside and out, this is not where the failure happens, the failure happens within the high turn over tech staff that is doing most of the work. When you provide the keys to your site to some kid who is fresh out of school and has optimize maybe 2 sites in total, the risk moves up.
In general my opinion is that a good SEO is one who has been optimizing sites for a period of time, hopefully a long period of time. This individual has made mistakes and has clearly learned from his or her mistakes. We can only grow in this industry by error itself. I have personally optimized 100’s upon 100’s of sites, some small and some large. But actually being in the trenches for the past 7 years has given me a leg up. Many of the top guys in the SEO industry have built names from themselves in a short period of time, and they do a great job. Thus the need of a lot of experience is not necessary, but it prepares you for sudden changes in search algorithms that can really shake up your life.
Danny was very right in his logic and reasoning around the majority of the industry. Almost everyone has good intentions and very few that are bad are still in business. A lot of us remember the trafficpower.com days, far and few between.
Now for my controversial view, when you take away the rest of the small sites out there and look at the big bad boys. The landscape of knowledgeable people changes dramatically. To optimize a large high trafficked website requires a dramatically different thinking process. Yes all the same practices apply, but how do you get the search engine to like all 100 million pages? This is where I feel there are a lot of snake oil firms selling. Most large SEO firms CANNOT handle ultra sized websites.
Most commonly the first things a person will experience working with a large company is all of the red tape and road blocks. It takes a lot of one on one time with the engineering staff and the capability of drawing ideas out of their staff. If you cannot get them on your side, you are sunk and the project will fail!
Of the consultants that I know in the industry, the only ones that I would throw at a large company are Joseph Morin, Rand Fishkin and Andy Beal. I have seen their reactions and how they present themselves in such a manner that can be conducive of a productive meeting. I am sure there are many others out there that I do not know, and forgive me for not mentioning you. People, who know me, also know I will never recommend anyone that I wouldn’t use myself.
Yes, I tend to write in a very scattered way, so I will say in short. I think Jason’s comments where a bit too generalized and Danny made it clear. But there is a difference between a standard SEO and a fortune 500 SEO.
Labels: seo
by Aaron Shear
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