Dvergar wrote:
Also, now that you lay it all out it seems a bit more interesting. "I know how to game search engines" does sound like a less than interesting skill from that sentence alone. Not that I didn't think it was important to businesses, just didn't seem very interesting.
Yes, it's a lot more than just gaming search engines. In fact, if you set out just to game search engines, you'd surely end up getting sites banned.
I feel fortunate I've been able to learn about this field since I was in high school and making my own crappy web sites (first web site I ever made was a web site about Cheetahs in 7th grade lol).
It's a constantly changing field...and really no one knows Google's algorithm perfectly (it's very tightly guarded, I had to surrender my phone and sign a million waivers when I visited their offices....white boards all over the place had crazy formulas that I couldn't even begin to understand), so search rankings could change and you'd have no idea why. However, if you follow best practices, keep up with times, and adjust on the fly, you can have success.
It's also an interesting, and awkward dance with Google. They both hate and love SEO's. They hate spammers and actively combat them, but they respect white hat SEO's and realize the SEO industry is here to stay. Matt Cutts is Google's chief SEO/search index guru, he loves to drop hints about algorithm changes, what Google looks for in a site etc.
At the end of the day, Google's goal is to rank the best web sites highest. To that end, SEO has shifted much more to a quality assurance angle, while also making sure the site is optimized for Google's search robots and has a powerful backlink profile.
There can be sweeping changes to algorithms, and it's what makes me lose sleep at night, knowing that Google could tweak something and destroy the ranking of a bunch of my sites. At the same time, I respect what they're trying to do. They released a huge update almost a year ago, the first "panda" update. It was designed to go after content farms (ehow, etc.). Luckily none of our sites were affected, but eHow got RAPED for having shit content and not being worth their rankings.
The next algorithm update is coming soon...who knows what it'll bring.
