Dallas Web Site Design

Crisis in SEO-Town; Where are all the educated SEO’s?

April 27th, 2007

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. “Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English philosopher, mathematician and writer.

Trouble is brewing in the SEO world as the demand for services has finally begun to outpace the supply capacity. There is tremendous growth in SEM and SEO and because of that all the experienced SEO professionals are employed and paid well. Companies are beginning to find that not every SEO is what they claim to be. The problem isn’t that there aren’t people to fulfill demand it’s that there is a lack of any common SEO curriculum. There is no standard and this means that every SEO/SEM practitioner is self-taught; much of the “knowledge” that people teach themselves is speculation. The accurate information becomes diluted in the blog-o-sphere and information becomes no longer fact based but socially based. “This SEO says on his blog and he learned from this SEO” and so on and so forth, it’s a game of he said she said.

During an Webpro News video interview Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit discussed the overall lack of common curriculum and the widespread misconception of basic SEO ideas. Amanda described her experience at a recent networking event. A woman said to her “oh I’ve got a great web developer, he really know how to hide those keywords in a background color that’s looks just like the background”. Amanda and the interviewer both shared a laugh as this technique is widely outdated and discredited.

Many wonder why the mainstream educational system hasn’t picked up search engine optimization as a course and degree option. Although schools have not yet added degrees or certifications there is a growing offering of articles brief overviews and small seminars. Many wonder if a standard curriculum is possible with the speed of change in the SEO industry. Listed below are the sections and offerings of various schools in the United States and Australia.

University SEO Offerings

http://www.scs.rice.edu/NccCourseView.asp?Mode=View&clCourseID=522&SnID=2

http://www.utah.edu/uwebresources/seo/index.html

http://www.unimelb.edu.au/webcentre/topics/seo.html

http://www.utas.edu.au/webservices/howto/seo/index.html

http://www.uc.edu/ucomm/web/seo.html

http://manchester.uiu.edu/marketing/web/seo.html

http://www.humboldt.edu/~web/articles/category/C24/

http://www.luc.edu/web/resources_search_engine.shtml

http://www.umd.umich.edu/webcontent_seo/

Government SEO Offering

http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/resources/training/university/courses/spring2007/advancedseo.shtml

Entry Filed under: Dallas Search Engine Optimization