Shari Thurow of Omni Marketing Interactive, Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam, Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Guide, Jonathan Hochman of Hochman Consultants, and Kathleen Fealy of SEMPO and KFMultimedia & Web were on hand to discuss the state of SEO reputation. Overall, SEO is a fairly young profession with roots in both marketing and information technology but because of it's newness, it is sensitive to negative publicity that occurs. The session was mainly Q/A with the audience, but each of the presenters had a short story or point to relate before the Q/A began.

Shari Thurow began the session by describing her experience as a Microsoft Search Champ a few years back. After attending a a kind of "summit" for online marketers at Microsoft, she came across a post from one of the attendees that expressed some of the public perception of SEOs. Mary Hodder of Napsterization wrote: "I'm at a search event at Microsoft.. of the 32 or so people.. there are about six search engine optimization people here. Kind of like being at the FBI and having criminals helping out in the room..." Shari said that as she unable to reply to this blog post directly, but she did end up "replying" in other ways... by speaking out about SEO on the web, in conferences, posting an article in a journal aimed at librarians, speaking at colleges, and so on. She also believes that we need to teach people how to find and identify good and bad search results and to dislodge the notion that a first place ranking in Google is always the best answer when one is searching.

Guarantees, like the overblown one in the title of this article, are items that web site owners should look out for when searching for an online marketer according to Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam. Too many companies try to find short cuts to gaining rankings and end up going with marketing companies that have over blown promises, don't deliver, and end up causing a negative impression of the SEO industry.

Jonathan Hochman explained that some of the reputation problem stem from practices like link selling. He says that selling link on sites like eBay, should be considered fraudulent. He wonders why eBay would continue to let auctions like these go up:

Above, I did a search for "link seo" at ebay and found an auction on 9/11/2007 where links are selling for $15. The text from the first auction says: "PR6 PAGE RANK 6 BACKLINK BACK LINK PAGERANK LINK 6 SEO".

Hochman is very big on Wikipedia and has an editor there for several years. He mentions that Wikipedia has worked to include the "no follow" tag on their pages due to SEO contests and others ploys to game Wikipedia. Typically as just about any one can edit Wikipedia, some aggressive marketers add links to their own sites or sites that they want to promote. In turn, Wikipedia took the step to include "no follow" to links in order to make this practice less appealing. (I would relate this to how search engines long ago devalued the meta keywords tag because marketers were stuffing these tags with keyword that had no relation to on page or on site content.)

Kathleen Fealy was up next. Although she had her own consulting company, she was mainly representing SEMPO, the "Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization". She said that she has spoken with a number of small businesses regarding search marketing and SEO. She says that she works with a lot of people in the mid/small biz sector. They have often been burned by email scams and new marketing "schemes" that go bad. She says that it is a challenge to market to some companies because there is confusion over what SEO is and thus the head of an IT department may rule that SEO doesn't work since some searches don't consistently display the same results over time. Many companies are familiar with pay per click programs, and don't see the value in SEO when they can just "pay for a ranking".

Fealy also says that as you never know if some is qualified to do SEO or not. She also argues that a little knowledge can be dangerous as some traditional marketers (print/radio/tv) some times get into SEO thinking "how hard can it be? It's programming for the "other web browser" [search engines]." Consultants doing similar jobs will give different pricing, some SEOs will use technical jargon, or and may give conflicting advice.

She says that perception is reality. A quality SEO may review a site and find that it needs a lot of work in order to make it spider friendly. But if the web site owners have been going through a "template" oriented web site company, they may ask the template company to make the edits to the web site template rather than working with the SEO. The problem with this is that the template company may agree to make changes but may not really understand what changes are needed or what SEO is, in the first place. The web site owner may view the template company's changes as SEO and think that SEO is a not real because they still haven't gained rankings.

Finally Jennifer Laycock was up. Part of her message was that you should be careful when interacting with social web sites like forums. You run the risk of destroying credibility. She likens this to going to a class reunion and having a business card shoved at you by some one who now works in insurance rather than just taking part in the reunion. She mentions her Bentoyum experiment and how competitors and others can misinterpret your actions and think you are trying to market to the community rather than take part. (She has a great series of articles on the Bentoyum experiment that you might want to check out.)

After this point, the floor was open and discussion began about how we, as an industry, might help shape the opinions that others have of our industry. There was some discussion about naming, should we call ourselves Internet Marketing Consultants vs. SEOs? Like Shari Thurow's presentation, a lot of talk focused on providing some type of outreach to other businesses as this may help people outside of our industry, to understand SEO. Kristopher Jones of Pepperjam said that he was irritated with people who are upset with things but don’t do anything to lead and change to change things. Bill Slawski from Seo by the Sea was in the audience and led a brief discussion on getting people away from the whole "black hat" vs. "white hat" mentality. The discussion focused on the opinion that the results, history, or reality of your work are better indicators of your skill than saying you subscribe to this or that theory of doing SEO. It seemed like there was a general consensus that if you use risky techniques to rank a page/site, often considered black hat, that you should warn your client of the possible repercussions.

Overall, the industry is still young and SEO has a lot of gray areas… what is good today, may be considered bad tomorrow and vice versa. It might be beneficial to know both the white and black hat side of things so you can understand SEO as a whole. Because there are SEOs who are all over the spectrum as far as SEO knowledge, experience, and ability, I don't think the reputation problem will go away very quickly.

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