It has been stewing in my head for quite a while but I could never quite put my finger on it metaphorically speaking, but SEO certification is never going to happen, sure you could probably run a course in the fundementals but a full blown course covering everything from learning HTML through to distinguishing link patterns and separating the shite and chaff from the shine is not going to stand still while you figure out your methods.

The true learning of how to implement SEO along with best practices for SEM is learned over a period of years… I am still learning more than a decade later, don’t get me wrong I know what I am doing and I achieve the desired results for my clients, probably not at the scale I and they would like, but I get there.

This all did not come about by fluking it, it took a lot of learning in the field, building my own sites, testing them, fucking them up and testing new ones while learning from my experiences. It has me at a stage right now where you get a “Feel” for a new site the first time you visit it, that “feel” comes from experience, time served experience in both learning from the mistakes you have made, learning from the mistakes of others (after testing them) and all the while staying on top of developments and keeping your clients sites moving in the right direction.

It is a very hard metaphor to translate into the written word, but you do come to a point where your first instinct when visiting a site whether you have anything to do with it or not is to get a look at the source code, navigate your way to the robots.txt critique the navigation while inwardly thinking “I would have done that differently”.

And that is precisely my point, time served SEO’s will have a “feel” for a site long before they even get to the code, they just “know”. They know this because they have spent loooong nights looking at code, writing code, watching the effects both good and bad.

So how are we to distinguish between those new to SEO that have not had the time in the field and those that bang the drum?

Candidates walking into an interview would not get far by proclaiming “I Feel SEO”, they would receive a kind of look with head tilted to one side that would suggest “this guy is crackers”. Personally I would sit them in front of a machine and ask them to create 3 simple pages coding HTML using Notepad from a short list of topics the candidate could choose from.

Sounds simple right? It can’t be that simple, but as a potential employer looking to train a new search marketer in my team, that’s how I would approach it. From there I would scale a series of the fundamentals.

This is to me not a clearer indication of what an SEO is or even does because my methods are not the same as other freelancers, agencies and consultants. For all I may have been around a while even I would find it difficult to walk into an agency and fit right in, I would have to adapt and learn their processes and ways of approach, our fundamentals are essentially the same but in many ways a world apart. But we both could approach a new site and objectively have a “feel” for it pretty much instantly, within seconds. You can’t teach that. It’s learned with time.