Graphic designers are not seos

The search industry is chock a bloc full of experts.  Eight out of ten graphic designers consider themselves to have seo skills, and it appears that anyone who performs the slightest morsel of research and understands the concepts of keywords and backlinks too quickly awards themselves the title of seo.

Does installing photoshop and illustrator on your PC make you a graphic designer?
Graphic design programs are getting easier to use.  Each release includes more user friendly features making the tools more intuitive.  The pitfalls and stumbling blocks that require specialist user knowledge to get around are being identified.  The programs accumulate a greater base of knowledge as they gather mainstream acceptance; everyone is a graphic designer.
But we all know this is not the case.  Graphic designers need to understand art and how it is made.  They need to understand composition, shape, color, form.  In my experience, good graphic designers can paint, draw and illustrate - by hand – no computer needed.  It is not the tool, it is how it is used.
Sure the nature of graphic design changes with technology; but it is the graphic designer that accommodates the features and pitfalls of technology and makes art.
In fact when someone calls themselves a graphic designer with no art background or experience, people want proof in a “all labour pain no baby” environment.

An expert is someone who says something you don’t understand.  And when the Seo babbles gibberish people with little or no knowledge assume they are an expert.  Reading information can arm you with enough knowledge to hang in there, even to talk with authority, but you need experience to call yourself an seo. This is a modern phenomena; in the old days we needed expert technical knowledge to gain high listings. The drive towards user experience has seen google tweak their search algorithm over time, making the content on the page more important than the site structure and underlying codes.  The nature of the seo changed.  The skill set becoming more content creation and marketing and less site structure and off page considerations.

The full impact of seo is yet to be  realized here in Melbourne, Australia. Do a search on “seo blog,” or “seo blog melboure,” and there are surprisingly few people out there doing it.  This tells me there is an opportunity; many prepared to talk the talk, but hey, I’m blogging seo and walking by myself here.

So it’s time to bung the seo slab on the yardstick and see how she measures up:

What are my target keywords?
Seo Melbourne

Where am I?
Position 17 in google.com.au and position 22 in google.com

 
I call myself an seo because I publish my listings, I have no reason to hide behind techno-babble. I am always making seo experiments; targeting keywords and monitoring the progress.  This very article here is part of an ongoing experiment.