by David Naylor

Originally posted on the David Naylor Blog.

I often get asked, normally by other SEO’s or journalists that are writing about search, what is SEO? What is Search Engine Optimisation? I often struggle to give a one line answer other than “we are the strange breed of people that makes websites like yours appeal to websites like Google and Bing”

So why the Internet needs SEO specialists like me in the words of John MU (Googler)

(did you know that serving a 503 HTTP result code for the robots.txt will block crawling of your site completely?).

I wonder how many people may have read that statement and thought nothing more than that’s not my problem? Or that if you 301 redirect a page 5 times it’s classed has a 404? Wonder how many web design companies check the 301s or even know what a bloody 301 is?

I wonder how many NON SEO’s have read these papers:

http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/robots_meta_tag.html

http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/robots_txt.html

http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

What saddens me is I also wonder how many SEO’s have read those papers, or even know what http status codes are, or the fact that our industry is Google crazy. For me if it doesn’t work in Bing, it doesn’t work in Google and Bing has some smart tools :

Bing Webmaster tools:

also check out Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit another great product

So why the Internet Needs SEO’s is because we are the breed of people that actually help get your website in order so that you have the best possible chance of getting fully indexed and ranking, SEO are the people that monitor and watch the changes that the search companies apply to their properties. We are not to be mistaken for SEO sales people who will promise you the world and untold wealth for £500 a month, (let face facts if it was that easy they wouldn’t be selling it they would be doing it), or businesses that see SEO as a quick bolt on to web design but still let your homepage have title tags like, homepage !

Dave