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SEO Certification: Don’t Be A Fool!
November 28th, 2008 | Posted in Marketing, Profit.
I couldn’t help but chuckle at every self-proclaimed SEO certified professional. Needless to say many companies are making a bunch of money offering SEO certifications to oblivious buyers. To be straight, you shouldn’t be able to charge clients $200+ per hour just because you spent nearly a fourth of your annual income to be “certified”.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a highly needed skill in today’s web-focused world. If done right, the results are phenomenal. Organic search traffic is highly valuable for any website, since it’s free. Would you rather pay thousands of dollars a month for paid ads or pay nothing per month for the same amount of traffic? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to answer this one.
As with all things, there really isn’t a proven guaranteed way to perform SEO. Search engines algorithms are continuously changing and therefore no one can make SEO an exact science. It’s really a continuous trial and error game with no guarantees for a top ranking position.
So how do you become an SEO expert? Well, it first begins with the basics. By reading reliable SEO blogs such as SEOmoz, SEOBook, and even Search Engine Land to name a few, you’ll be on the right track in no time. Try out what you’ve learned from these sources and apply them to your personal websites. If you feel that you have gained search engine rankings by what you have done, then it may be alright to start offering it as a service to your clients.
There are three ways to bill for this service. The most common ways are to bill by the hour or to bill by the project. The third and less widely used way to bill is by performance. Basically, your clients will pay a set amount per month upon the condition that their website reaches a certain search engine ranking. The pay by performance model can be quite risky and has the potential to make you do a lot of free work.
So in the end, don’t waste your money on getting an SEO certification and focus more on the free and low cost resources available online. Try these processes out first on your own sites before you try them on your clients. If it all works out, you could be looking at gaining some much needed profit.
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IT Certification
December 21st, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Nice work man..keep it up.
Annuity Rates
January 28th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
If you know how to do serious SEO, then showing potential clients your past results with high positions on tough keywords is a sure sell. That’s how I hired my SEO guy, and he really delivers.
Find Engine
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Nice post you got in here, thanks. Nobody can really claim as seo ‘experts’ because the search algorithms that rank pages is a well-guarded secret in the first place.
Matt Hayden
May 28th, 2009 at 5:13 am
I agree that certification is not a necessity. The main thing is to have practical experience. Still, people do get a feeling of confidence from seeing an official looking qualification or diploma. So it can’t hurt to have one as well.
And there are some that are quite affordable now, Expertrating.com and Seocertification.org, for example.
Michigan Web Design Company
June 2nd, 2009 at 1:24 am
Interesting topic you got here Allan,
Catchy title.
I agree that although SEO certification is not necessity, but still it has a plus factor.
SEO
June 5th, 2009 at 2:56 am
The important thing according to me is knowledge and if you possess it you don’t need to have any certification what so ever.
ivy
June 6th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Thanks for the entry. I was trying to get a seo certification, but after reading your post, looks like i really dont need it all. More power!
-ivy, dvdprods.com
Perfect Shave Dispatch
June 25th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Having certifications (I don’t specifically mean SEO certifications) is a good thing but nothing really compares to keeping your skills updated by simply doing what’s need to be done. If it means reading, and reading, and reading informative web site resources, do it.
Jacques Lemans
July 7th, 2009 at 2:23 am
If you know how to do serious SEO, then showing potential clients your past results with high positions on tough keywords is a sure sell.