Warmest Greetings,

:: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 ::

[7/23/2002 7:40:33 PM | Kimberly Krause]
She's an SEO Gladiator
At 08:59 AM 7/21/02, Phil wrote: (in the Cre8asite Forum)
"I have never heard of an seo who doesn't create new pages."

I never have, unless you consider building html sitemaps to be creating a new page. As far as what optimizing I do, it's all in the code (how the site is built), refocusing meta tags and title tags to fit the subject matter of each page, and adding to or rewriting content so that stands a chance of being properly categorizied by both engine and human editors. All the other things done over the years, including optimizing per engine, I never did.

There's always been a catch-all phrase for people who work sites to be indexed and/or ranked by search portals such as Search Engine Marketing or Optimizers. But I've found there's many ways of approaching our goals and "marketing" isn't always part of it. (This is why I changed the name of my site from Cre8pc Website Promotion to just Cre8pc.) Being a manual submitter and never straying from that, I stood apart from all those who got into the business and relied on software like WebPositionGold. I charged less than those who used automatic software to guide them in their optimization, and gave more personalized attention because my goals weren't about earning a living doing this. My interests and career goals lay elsewhere but I enjoyed the challenges of helping web sites navigate the world of search engines. My freelance in SEO was via word of mouth from happy clients. I never needed to advertise.

You'll note that some SEO companies advertise all the time, and many use scare tactics to get new clients. I don't consider myself in the same line of work as those companies because I'd never resort to desperate tactics to get clients or to promote their sites.

The other thing I'd like to point out is that lumping everyone together, and all SEO procedures together, isn't accurate or fair. We don't all have the same approach, use the same methods, or have the same business goals. For example, my goal was ALWAYS to make sure my clients didn't need me anymore. I never provided long-term contracts or made promises to anyone about results. I chose to teach my clients how to manage their own SEO for their own sites. This was included in my fee. I didn't want a bunch of co-dependent clients. I wanted to enrich my clients with knowledge and resources so that they'd be independent and be able to create their own Internet destiny. I never met another person in the business with that approach and who in their right mind would do it like that anyway? But like I said, I've always been different. Cre8pc.com has always been a labor of love. (It wasn't until I put a services page on my site that Yahoo! would accept it into their Directory - which is why, after arguing with Yahoo! for 2 years after my site was dropped from their database when they switched to fee submissions, I advertised providing services. It was to get back into Yahoo!, not to get new clients.)

Just because one or a few of us do things a little differently doesn't mean we're any less skilled. Working on corporate sites with proprietary software driven pages and trying to get those pages into engines because the company stock depends on it - that's the world I come from. In the 1990's it was fun to build sites, submit them, alter pages to climb up rank and watch the traffic numbers change depending on what you did. It was TONS of fun to optimize, change code, experiment. We learned rather quickly what not to do, especially when some engines had a beef about something and would ban pages. If you were smart, you followed the rules - especially if your job responsibilities included "getting sites into engines." Nowadays, it's not fun. You send money and get rank. You send money and get indexed. You pay Yahoo! to look at it and pray they don't refuse it so your $299 fee doesn't go down the drain.

I prefer to be called an SEO Gladiator.

What we do for websites is necessary. How we do it is all over the place as far as what's available, ethical, moral, and all those code words. Some people would never consider jaywalking in a US street even if there was no police person there to ticket them. Others could care less and will take risks to cross the street and get to other side. We may all have heads, 2 arms, 2 legs, but we each make different choices with what we do with them. You can't lump us all together and expect us to all be called the same thing or do the exact same things.

It's the same thing with SEO. I'm happy to educate people and let them make the final choice. I also turn down those who want me to perform certain tasks I won't do, such as cloaking, mirror/cloned sites and doorway clones with different domains. If a client asks me to abuse technology or do something I'm uncomfortable with even if it's not really that objectionable (doorways are not bad for example. How they're built is where the potential is for risk.) I have the right to say no, and I do. They'll find someone else in this business who will gladly do as they ask.

Kim

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 7/23/2002 08:43:35 PM

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