Should You Listen to SEO 'Gurus'?

SEO advice is offered for sale these days from every corner – from other webmasters, freelance writers and search engine reps as well as from firms, website developers and so called ‘gurus’. It can be difficult to decide who is giving good advice that will actually help and who is giving a summation or hodgepodge of different techniques that have bee tried over the past decade.

This creates a bit of a problem especially when the SEO advice is accompanied with a hefty fee. Who do we listen to when seeking SEO advice?

SEO is an important skill for any writer that uses the web as an avenue to publicize their work or promote a product or service for a client.  There are several for pay agencies that offer good SEO advice, but don’t give you the whole picture and aren’t quite designed to deliver perfect results.

Unless you are willing to pay for an individual review of your site, have specific keyword research done and extensive testing to determine your key demographic, paying an SEO may not be able to help you!

What you are generally going to receive from ‘SEO training camps’ run by ‘gurus’ is a manual to follow and a way to compile a list of words and phrases that may or may not help to boost your ranking on search engines. It is up to you to figure out how to use it – and if you have no idea what you are doing you are probably going to end up stuck trying to optimize for the same words everyone else is and getting lost in the pile, or focusing hard on one area of optimization to the neglect of others and ruining your chances of ranking at all.

You often can’t know the true credentials of the people posting advice or peddling their knowledge, and  just have to accept on faith that you are being given solid advice rather than something which is just a hypothesis.

One good idea is to look at some of the advice such ‘guru’s give, and compare it to community forums where ordinary webmasters come together to share info and ideas. The advantage to this is that a lot of information is tried out and vetted by writers that have already been through the SEO challenge, and are not only sharing what works but what doesn’t as well.

Should you listen to SEO gurus? Better to hire a professional service with a sterling reputation, and even then to check their advice against others out there trying to boost their own rankings!