Tech Mentat

Today Bruceclay wrote a quick update on various search news over the past few days. The people over at Bruceclay always have great stuff to say (I am a fan) and they are good people too (got a chance to a few of them at this year’s SES in San Jose).

What I wanted to point out, however, is the comment made regarding this week’s article on search optimizatio by Dave Pasternack from Did-it.com. There was a LOT of discussion around this particular article (and great thoughts all around by everyone that I read). But I think that Susan over at Bruce Clay hit the hammer on the nail (what?) when she wrote:

“The truth is that you hire an SEO firm for the same reason you hire a gardener. Sure you can do it yourself, do all the weeding and the hedge clipping and watering the lawn and …other things involved in having a yard (I live in an apartment, my greenery is limited to a single dying orchid). But you have a business to run and presumably a life to lead and chances are that you have as much interest in learning about how to care for your rhododendrons as you have in doing your own brain surgery. So you hire a professional to take care of your yard for you, he keeps it looking good and you can focus on going about your business. ‘Nuff said!”

Actually, I am not even sure sure if Susan understands how concise & profound her statement is. The profundity comes in two POV or results; one is that the average day-to-day SEO will become akin to the cheap, migrant laborer who cuts your shrubs and basically cleans up the mess around your home (this will be the case for websites that don’t have the money or insight to hire the educated professionals - but make no mistake, many will exploit this low-cost to their advantage). The other result is that their that an educated hierarchy will form (we already see this starting with cert. programs that are popping up) and that these will be akin to those individuals who go and get their masters or phd’s in landscape architecture.

Sure, it might seem all very mundane and obvious to most of us… BUT this only feeds to how incredibly missinformed Mr. Pasternack was when he wrote his article.