I just read this post, and thought I'd share. I have to admit I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. Sorry folks
"SEO Expert"
If you haven't heard of it (lucky you), SEO is the process in which you try and get a website to appear higher up in the search engines. In many cases this seems to involve posting really bad English and uninteresting articles on blogs in order to cheat Google's algorithm and then frowning at anyone smarter who uses "black hat" techniques to 'cheat'.
Generally the difference between black hat techniques and normal SEO is that black hat techniques require some logic, programming skills and understanding of how search engines are built, and normal SEO just requires reading blogs for tips and hearsay, then spamming any sites with at the very most, your basic html skills (Which, for some reason, they don't see as cheating because anyone can do it).
The thing is, I've read books on SEO and there really is **** all to it - they end up writing about 1/3 of the book about how to submit a site to search engines and then fail to mention important things like the fact that Google personalise search results so that most people see different results anyway.
Besides that, everything to SEO is common sense to someone who knows how to build websites. Just think how you'd build a search engine and work backwards. Google's Page Rank algorithm is even available on line for someone with decent technical knowledge.
And that's where my bugbear lies. Most people who describe themselves as "SEO Experts" almost never have any technical knowledge. They generally have never built a website in their life and generally have no technical skills. They are salesmen and marketers. Often just salesmen.
(Google's Page Rank algorithm is available on-line, so if you want a laugh - send a copy to your "SEO expert" and ask them to talk you through it scientifically without using their awful babied-down understanding of it with sick-inducing phrases such as "link juice")
"Expert" is nothing but a vanity title. SEO is such a small area of building a website. It's like saying to someone with a linguistics doctorate that I'm an alphabet expert because I know it all from A to Z.
Likewise, the term "Social Media Expert" is exactly the same. It doesn't mean you know how to build a site like Twitter, it means you have a Twitter account that you use to post tedious spam to the world and some of your tedious "Social Media Experts" friends follow you.
These people call themselves "experts", generally not because they are experts, but because they are self-lauding c***s who have awarded themselves that title. It's also to make it sound like their job is difficult, when it isn't.
Interesting that most people with actual practical skills never do feel the need to use words like "expert" in their job description.
Source:
http://www.b3ta.com/questions/buzzwords/
I'd also like to see how many people comment on this thread with their own daft SEO ideas, rather than something related to the above.
