One thing I have noticed is that SEO/SEM is really in its infancy insofar as mainstream business understanding it’s concept and it’s enormous ROI potential. Another thing I have noticed is that most business owners, marketing managers and definitely human resource folks don’t have a clue as to the value an experienced SEO brings to a company. Many companies are listing a wide range of requirements, like below:

· 5 years experience optimizing SEO campaigns through “White Hat methods”, with a minimum of three years successfully creating and managing Google AdWords and Yahoo! Sponsored campaigns;
· Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing, Advertising, Business or other related field;
· Track record of leadership, coaching and mentoring abilities, with proven experience in managing people;
· Excellent analytical skills, including experience reviewing campaign performance results and making recommendations for future action;
· Strong knowledge of search engine algorithms, organic searching, and ranking strategies for Google;
· Experience with Landing page conversion optimization (A/B testing, multivariate testing and offer testing background);
· Proficiency with Microsoft Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.);
· Minimum of 3 Years Management Experience, with demonstrated proficiency in the competencies for Senior Leadership (achievement orientation, team leadership, adaptability, business acumen)
· Experience hand coding HTML and CSS are definitely a plus;
· Working knowledge of web analytic and bid-management tools such as Atlas One Point, SearchIgnite, Webtrends, Hitbox Professional, Omniture, Core Metrics;
· Experience with online display advertising, banner advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Web site Analytics and Web site Conversion Metrics (CPM, CTR, CPC, CPL, CPA) is a bonus.

• Organic Search Program Management
• Monitor overall SEO program success with regards to ranking, indexed pages, back links, traffic acquisition and report to senior management
• Analyze sites for opportunities in optimizing architecture, usability, conversion and navigation results
• Audit the website’s technical infrastructure and identify obstacles that may cause spider accessibility issues
• Perform competitive analyses to monitor weakness and opportunities and help improve natural results
• Identify editorial/keyword opportunities and assist in the content strategy and execution to acquire traffic for targeted terms/phrases
• Optimize various website components to improve visibility/rankings as well and traffic conversion
• Examine the linking environment and craft a plan for the acquisition and optimization of inbound links
• Ensure the necessary tracking is in place to monitor the performance of the optimization program
Analytics Management
• Ensure Web analytic tools (Omniture and Google Analytics) are correctly implemented and managed as to ensure reporting is available to key stake holders
• Analyze and create reports that highlight the progress against key performance indicators.
• Experience developing, implementing and maintaining a search strategy, with a strong emphasis on organic search
• Experience with SEO reporting, web analytics tools and multivariate testing
• Experience working in both a B2B and B2C internet space, with an emphasis on transactional/ecommerce
• Extensive knowledge of primary and secondary search engine mechanics
• Ability to interact with a variety of departments and different levels of management
• Strong computer skills, including extensive knowledge of MS Excel and PowerPoint
• Organized and attention to detail is a MUST. Ability to work independently and as part of a team, pro-active versus reactive, ability to problem solve and to work successfully within a set process, and coordinate as needed with multiple internal clients and vendors.
• Strong understanding of technology (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, AJAX)
• In-depth knowledge of search engine technologies (algorithms, ranking strategies and industry trends)
• Ability to understand HTML code for title tags, meta-description tags, keyword tags, ROBOTS.txt files, redirects, etc
• Strong understanding of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
• Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing or Business Administration is preferred.
• Minimum 2 years SEO relevant work experience
• Familiarity with how web browsers and servers work and interact
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong analytics and reporting skills

But then they offer salaries in the range of $35k-$45k – I think it will take a while yet till those doing the hiring catch on to the fact that SEO and most of SEM is not taught in school and only comes from specific experience and following the trends and changes on a daily basis. Many parts of proper SEO is still an art and not quite a science, so offering a low salary while requiring tons of specialized experience is the recipe for having a position sit empty for a long, long time.

I currently see five positions that have been searching for someone for more than six months. I can’t even imagine the opportunities (and $$) they are losing in the meantime. I would also guess that many of these SEO positions will be filled by unqualified candidates that will either harm the websites or do nothing for them. There are two major barriers which seem to be causing this problem; firstly, many of the people doing the hiring don’t know very much about SEO – other than, they have heard their business can leverage it to increase the bottom line. Because of this lack of knowledge it is hard for them to differentiate between candidates and it also makes it difficult for them to offer substantial salaries because they are not sure what type of ROI it will achieve. Secondly, many of the good SEO’s make considerable hourly income just offering consultations or running and optimizing their own sites, so the talent pool is very thin in almost every job market world-wide. Thirdly, a decision maker in this process may have come across some sort of advertisement online where a company is offering SEO services from overseas as ridiculously low rates and they figure if they could contract it out for X amount of money they should be able to get someone locally quite cheap. What they don’t realize is that 99.9% of these overseas operations offer zero value and are just doing low-quality directory submissions or submitting poorly translated articles or making spam comments in blogs to build up a few backlinks, which might have an end result of a search engine penalty or ban.

My advice is that every single business that has a web presence would benefit substantially by hiring an in-house SEO expert but don’t scrimp on the salary you are offering. If you find the right candidate don’t lose them over a few thousand dollars because long-term SEO can double, triple or add even more to your bottom line. The salary for an SEO professional should be in the $75k-$100k range and even more if you are asking them to take on marketing management duties in addition to SEO/SEM. If you have any doubts that those salaries are a ‘real’ bargain then take a look at our SEO pricing section.

The web is the wave of the future and if you wait too long to hire the right person you are not only losing tons of potential business but will have a lot of catching up to do and it will prove very costly.

Guaranteed ranking is one of the biggest scams out there right now and anyone that offers it is not a real SEO.  Real SEO’s understand that you can’t guarantee results because the search engines algorithms are secret and change contantly.  There are also other factors beyond the SEO’s control, what happens if your hosting has an outage during a Google indexing and  your site is dropped?  What happens if you site is hacked and someone puts spam in the content and it is de-indexed?  What happens if someone that has access to your site decides to change the title tag and your site nose-dives in the rankings.  What happens if…..

There was recently a very intersting and upsetting fiasco on DigitalPoint forums with a couple of senior members that were offering a guaranteed SEO ranking service.  The long and short of it was that senior member A and senior member B joined forces to offer an amazing SEO service that was guaranteed results or your money would be 100% refunded.  Here is an exact quote,

I am giving a FULL MONEY BACK GUARANTEE because if anything goes wrong, I will be responsible and no one else and I will be more than happy to REFUND YOU FULLY NO HASSLES!

Compensation is 100% money back as promised. Once the position is achieved, the negotiation will take place in order for your keyword to maintain the position.

I will rank any keyword (Yes you read this right, ANY KEYWORD) or any key phrase in the first page of Google with the competition of under 2 Million in the period of 4-8 Months. Of course many people here on DP can probably do SEO jobs and they can do it great but can they offer a MONEY BACK GUARANTEE?

This was promised by a member that has over 13,500 post and an iTrader rating of 462 complete successful deals.

Soon these type of posts began popping up (there was supposed to be a monthly report):

still no report and it is now half a month late. how many more broken promises are we going to have to put up with?

Still waiting for my report for the service I ordered on the 20th of February

Still no report. You said it would be sent on the 29th and then on 31st and still don’t have it.

Our report has not arrived despite numerous promises from you. Are you going to send it or not?

Please may I have m reports which you have promised you will send me on several occasions.

STILL waiting on a report DESPITE two weeks of being told “i’ll send it today”, this was due on march 14th. Can you send the report today?

Still waiting for report from the 5th from SEO services. Any idea when it will arrive?

Sold my share in “First Page in Google Services” ~ now owned by KingofKings 100%

As of today, these services are 100% owned by KingofKings via private arrangement. This service is in regards to all sales for the following threads:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=532262
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=757370

KingofKings is now taking these services to the next level of which I am unable to spend time on, due to other business projects.

Then the stuff really hits the fan at full speed:

That’s the problem I have. I am unable to fix whatever problems exist. King has the money, not me. If there is refunding to happen, it will come from King. If I did have the money I would refund people.

If you want to read the whole sad tale then head over to this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=757370&highlight=100%25+refund 573 posts in that thread alone with over 22k views.  It is estimated that over $60k in SEO fees were stolen.

The old version mentioned “a few unethical SEOs” in the fourth line and then jumped into a list of warning signs.  The revised help page introduces a negative in line three, but uses the gentler term “irresponsible.”  From there, it names a lot of possible benefits.

“Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including: Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure . . . Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript . . . Content development . . . Managing online business . . . development campaigns . . . Keyword research . . . SEO training.”

Relatively neutral, background check-type questions follow, and then the same warnings eventually appear.  It seems Google now has fewer qualms about nudging people towards SEOs, though, or has at least decided that its old description came off as too harsh.

Barry Schwartz deserves credit for unearthing the less-than-sweet version.  And perhaps as another way of saying “sorry,” Google’s asking people to contribute their own SEO-related recommendations.  Google has upset so many folks with it’s seemingly non discriminate penalties that it want to make nice with a portion of their professional user base?