So, you wanna' be an SEO, eh?

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So, you wanna' be an SEO, eh?

1997 vs 2007

pageoneresults

3:02 pm on Sep 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

So, you woke up this morning and decided, "Hey, I wanna' be an SEO." Why? What was it that you did that caused you to come to that conclusion?

The year: 1997. The search landscape: Yahoo!, Lycos, Infoseek, Inktomi, Excite, AltaVista, Hotbot, LookSmart, Northern Light, FAST and Ask Jeeves. Listed in order by launch date with Yahoo! being first.

At that point in time, SEO was the true Wild West of the Internet. Man, you could launch a new site and have it ranking in 24-48 hours. You could launch 10 new sites and have all of them ranking in 24-48 hours. You could even have all 10 of those new sites taking up the first 10 results in the SEs!

Not anymore. Something changed. :)

The year: 2007. The search landscape: Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

SEO is still the Wild West of the Internet but, the true Cowboys got real smart, and I do mean reeeaaalll smart!

So, where ya' gonna' start? Now that you've decided to become an SEO, what's your next move?

ebound

3:09 pm on Sep 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

The thought of starting over now gives me chills but here goes.

I would keep it simple. I'd start by finding an underserved niche, have access to one programmer and find a writer with strong knowledge of that niche. I'm still a strong believer that content is king.

RandomDot

9:47 pm on Sep 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

Let's see. I'd quit doing SEO to begin with, and then start my own search engine and make it way better than gaggle and yaahh and viiiile.

Then i'd market it and make it popular, just because i'd rock so much, and I would be the king, and all of my peasants would be you, while me and my aristocratic friends, the cool creators, had a fun time tricking you into the belief that you should adjust to all our algorithmic changes, which would only be seen on your computers, which you then could make screenshots out of and prove your good results, and then get customers we could ban for violating the ToS which would clearly state that you should not care about your rank in the search engine or try to manipulate it in any way.

And then I would rule the world, and that would probably not be the happy ending anybody wants - but nevertheless a fairytale which i'd enjoy very much.