I'm finally back in Seattle after a very nice trip to Florida. On the plane, I was thinking more broadly about the SEO industry and how quickly demand is going to outstrip supply (note the high number of SEOs wanted on CL) with regard to talented professionals. Sadly, there is no formalized training for our industry, and the learning process can be arduous and require great persistence (particularly as competition increases and new operators feel success less and less).
As a recent email to me noted, SEO is simply a form of marketing, but no university level marketing degree I'm aware of would provide a decent background for a professional seeking to enter SEO. In fact, unless you fall into the practice through experience, I'm unaware of any formalized training whatsoever. I suspect that the next year or two, however, will bring some forms of "certification" in the industry, but gaining widespread acceptance will be a challenge all its own. There are a few organizations who could muster the support to take on such a project - SearchEngineWatch is the first that comes to mind.
I did a few searches to confirm these suspicions and came away with mixed results. Dan Thies has a course that I'm sure is excellent. Bruce Clay has a type of certification through SEOToolSet (which I'm not familiar with). There's a few more that appear "real", but have no connections to anyone I recognize.
I also note that while some parts of the SEO game are teachable, others are not. For example, you could teach fairly standards form of:
- keyword research
- paid search marketing
- on page optimization (there could be some conflict here)
- canonical issues, robots.txt, .htaccess and other standard webdev protocols
- basics of link popularity
- IR fundamentals
But certain issues simply don't fit well into a classroom (or online class's) program:
- link building
- black hat tactics
- content generation
- social networking online
- public relations in the blogosphere
- link baiting
- competitive analysis (could go either way on this one)
I'd be interested to see who else takes up the crusade - it's a rare industry that has so few training options available, but such is the way in our tiny niche... for now.
I'll make people mad with this... but SEO by itself is not worth a pile of beans. To have an effecive website you must have more, and that "more" is content, product, salesmanship, etc. SEO has zero value without these things.
I see SEO as a single course in a larger program such as "internet marketing". At present there are very few of these programs but the importance of them is enormous to many businesses.
In my opinion this is an area where it will be hard to find a university professor who is highly qualified. The reason is that there is too much fun and very rewarding work out there to give up for a teaching job - or even to earn the PhD needed to land a position in the tenure track. Plus some colleagues will look at SEO as being "dirty" or "pedestrian".
I know lots of SEOs well and also know many PhD faculty even better and have been in that profession for long time. I don't see it happening at the University level beyond more than a course or at best two in a broader program.
So, the place where SEO education will happen is in forums and workshops and online courses. This is not a degree program or even certificate. It is simply a key additional knowledge for a professional who already has basic skill and training in other areas.
Great comments thus far. I think more needs to be done regarding promoting SEO in our educational system. I am trying to promote this myself and have launched a site around this theme.
I do agree with Rand and others who view SEO as a school of thought and as inseparable from internet marketing. I do feel SEO can be taught at Universities and best practices can be covered as well as courses on SEO ethics. As a marketing major myself I realize the importance of SEO education and am a strong proponent of it. You can see that Rice University offers an SEO course now as part of continuing education is a good way to promote SEO into the Educational system and once people realize the importance the demand will naturally drive this knowledge to the mainstream degree programs. I have launched a site SEO Class which aims to promote SEO in Education. If anyone has ideas, suggestions, or would like to collaborate on this please let me know. It is a brand new site with only a few articles as of yet so please contribute if you are interested.
Rand I think you make some excellent points. However I think, as others have also noted, the speed with which the industry changes makes a formal university program somewhat impractical.
In the past I've looked at starting an organization along the lines of the Project Management Institute, https://www.pmi.org/info/default.asp,in order to establish a level of professionalism within the SEM industry. Although one would think SEMPO would have taken a closer look at PMI when it was trying to establish industry leadership, the reality is the industry as a whole still lacks standards and as a result widespread respect.
I agree that the industry's best hope for establishing standards that companies can look to when making hiring decisions rests with SEW. Establishing a base level of knowledge in order to achieve a SEW certification and requiring ongoing education, conference attendance, online courses, etc., to maintain the certification would go a long way to establishing a legitimate standard on which to base hiring decisions, both in house and outsourced.
I know I pointed it out above but...
I'm not sure how big a role change would play. The tools we use change pretty frequently. The tactics get updated. But the core foundation of what we do - the concepts - stay pretty stable. SEO is after all, a branch of marketing. But really it comes down to 4 things:
1. Onpage Factors 2. Content 3. Offpage Factors (mainly BLs) 4. Strategy
The idea wouldn't to teach which onpage factors are hot this week, but rather to teach that onpage factors are important and then give the students the tools they need to evaluate them.
Content is already handled by most schools through various writting classes.
Offpage factors tend to get a bit tool-heavy. But there isn't anything that a script does that can't be done by hand and showing students how to look up competitors BLs manually and evaluate them would be more important than how to use "Bob's BL Widget".
Strategy would include competitive analysis and creating and implementing the plan of attack. These skills are already taught in project management courses. Or even in the process of getting the degree!
Almost exactly two years since you made the original post. We just conducted an online study regarding SEO training at the university level. You can see the results here: https://www.verticalmeasures.com/education.html
Happy Holidays Everyone!
I was just looking for well information about SEO and your information is interesting as well as awesome to get some useful points.
My particular frustration is that people with college degrees are getting jobs when I have experience and have been around since 2004. Total rookies coming into search and they know nothing about SEO. I've been overlooked more than a few times. I've had similar trouble in the personal training industry, there is no set standard and there really should be.
I am interested for summer training(especially in Chandigarh). I am thinking to go for SEO training. So if you could just resolve my query:To which companies I could apply and the procedure for applying?I would be grateful if you help me at the earliest..
Great topic Rand. Part of the problem of course is the incredible pace at which our industry moves. I think there is a need for outlining the conceptual aspects of SEO - philosophy and history for newer folks, but I think that is being done on line. Part of learning about SEO is learning how to disseminate the gold from the BS. I posted a mini-syllabus a while back on webmasterworld (*in supporter's forum).
I've been working on a much larger training syllabus consistently for quite some time by archiving important concepts and ideas in different categories. It's also important to know who the audience is, and how it will be applied.
When I was studying computer science for a very short while in school, I was always frustrated with the courses...at work I was using Novell 5, and they were teaching novell 3...a bit frustrating at times. I think SEO might be a bit of the same ('cept worse).
I totally agree though that there is a large market and need emerging for the education of SEO's. It would be nice to have something as a prelude to forums and blogs for students.
I agree with EGOL's comment on this one.
As far as SEO college ;-) I have a degree in 'E-business', a combination between mathemathics, IT and economics. A large part of the studies is about artificial intelligence (among others how SE's work).
Although it's a lot more then just SEO it fits the bill perfect. It's online marketing with a technical background.
I believe SEO courses are not given yet because SEO is not an independent subject, it is part of a whole, call it internet marketing, emarketing or whatever.
If we take a minute and think about that: what SEO is really about? We optimize pages to get "good content", clear our codes so pages are better crawled, try to get links etc. We do all these things because we somewhat know that these are algorithms factors that can improve our rankings, right? But robots have been created by humans in order to behave like a human seeing a website. If you concentrate on empathy and on the 5 or 6 P of marketing, then you will come up with a website that will satisfy the needs of your visitors. The rankings will come, don't worry.
People are sometimes too much into codes, programming, etc that they often forget that the key is MARKETING. Take a good student with a BS in Marketing, teach him HTML and other stuff about Web Design, and you will have an Internet Marketer, then ask him to do paid advertising or increase natural rankings. At the end, it's really just about marketing....
Rand,
The Search Engine College (www.searchenginecollege.com/) has been in existence for about 2 years. It's run by Kalena Jordan and her husband. You (and readers) may recognize some of the instructors. The college offers certificates, as well as a wide range of study, including usability. There are self-taught and tutor-taught options.
Perhaps a follow up interview with Kal would be beneficial to your readers? :)
In my opinion we need to slow down a bit here. In my opinion there is really no such thing as a SEO-profession. And with no SEO-profession there is no need for a SEO-education.
SEO is something that is done to reach a certain goal, pretty much like building a house. If you ask someone who takes part in this process what they are he or she will most likely not answer a house builder, no he or she will say I am a architect, I am a carpenter, I am a plumber and so on. Yes, they all take part in getting the house built, but they do different things and they have learnt their skills at different schools. It is the same thing with what we refer to as SEO: some are excellent programmers, others have a background in web design, marketing, statistics, business or other fields that are vital to SEO. We all need to do the best possible job in our various fields, of course I like to learn more about aspects of "SEO" that are unrelated to my background, but I get that through my work and involvement in the SEO community.
Or you could think of SEO as a very broadly defined occupational area, like health care worker or civil servant
ADDED: I just noticed the MIT logo, you are a funny guy Rand. :-) ROLF :-)
Part of the allure of SEO for me is the "fly by the seat of your pants" workflow. It's probably not a big shock that while being somewhat clever I did really poorly in school and hate formal learning environments.
I think of it this way, just because you are a certified executive chef doesn't mean you make tomato sauce any better than my grandma does.
A lot of great comments - I can get behind your point EGOL, that SEO has to be part of an Internet Marketing degree as a whole. BUT, I think that SEO has become Internet Marketing, at least to me, they're inseparable - both are about growing website traffic through any means possible. Even in SEO, we run print ads, get links that Google doesn't count, etc, and solid training in website traffic building would be invaluable - I can't imagine a serious online business operating without it.
Kim - Your suggestion to talk to Kalena is a good one. I'll try to get in touch and see if I can ask to review the online courses she has. That could be a good direction to send folks in.
Rand, did you ever do a review for Search Engine Collage?
I have been looking at them for a little while and thinking about doing one of the courses next month but can't really find anyone who gives them credit.
if not do you suggest any other courses.
I did use the search on seomoz but couldn't find anything.
Hope you can help, and keep up the good work.
Some of the issues you listed already fit in classrooms. Content generation would be English and creative writing along with other communications classes and even programming (your own tools are some of the best "content" out there).
Public relations isn't different online except it happens faster (unless you're waiting for it, then it's slower). Competitive analysis should already be taught as part of basic marketing - how does your competitions web site stand up against yours?
Granted, there is an SEO twist to what we do, but I think that's more concept than bookwork.
Most people don't get into their careers knowing everything there is to know about their chosen field. That's what internships are for. Someone with a degree in communications that is competent and comfortable with a web browser can do a lot of what we do.
But that does raise an interesting point - the technology. As more and more gets automated, would SOE Elite become an industry standard like DreamWeaver is for web design? Universities have a lot of pull when it comes to such things.
And ethics would have to play a role just as they do in business. But as to what that would look like, I'm not exactly sure. 302 hijacks, copyright infringement, pirated software would be issues to cover. But WH vs. BH would not.
WH and BH are not issues of ethics so much as long-term or short-term. The place ethics would play is making sure your client is aware of any risks associated with BH techniques.
But just because something is ok by Google today, doesn't mean it will be tomorrow (or even the reverse). I'll find my own moral center, thanks.
What's really interesting to me is that SEO is breaking down into specialties. Need backlinks? Call Bob. Need someone to review your site structure, call Jane.
I'm not sure that a classroom setting can keep up with these changes, especially as the SEs get more competitive and the difference in ranking factors gets more pronounced. You'll need a new syllabus each semester.
Also, my gut says that a university is more likely to see SEO as a web development path than a marketing one - even though that's not the case!
Realistically I see "career path" colleges taking the most advantage of this. Get your SEO Cert at ITT and start working in just 6 months!
We've been providing SEO training services (both public and private courses) in Finland for about 3 years, so I can provide some views about providing SEO training. IMO the main challenge is that only few can, and are willing to master SEO as a hole. The phrase "Copywriters don't code, coder's don't copywrite, marketers only do marketing plans, designer's make pretty pictures" says much about the problems faced with SEO training.
2K: IMO the main challenge is that only few can, and are willing to master SEO as a hole. The phrase "Copywriters don't code, coder's don't copywrite, marketers only do marketing plans, designer's make pretty pictures" says much about the problems faced with SEO training.
This is very very true... and most current websites have had all of these different pieces (coding, art, copy, marketing, etc.) slapped together with little thought to how they will be treated by the search engines. Enormous amounts of money have been wasted or spent inefficiently.
IMO the SEO should be a key member, if not the director, of the project development team. He/she should be involved immediately at the start of the project. Without that vision most projects will meander off track. This person must be very good at interpersonal relations because designers, coders, marketers and writers all think that any project revolves around them. lol