As title. Looking to learn...

What would you like to know? It's a suprisingly complex field

Are you looking to improve page ranking or know how to add it for others? Or improve the quality of it for things like content ownership/publishing?

It most certainly is.

Mark

Google have some very good blogs and guidelines on what is 'legal' and what isn't. That would be a good place to start. If you do 'illegal' things, i.e. things Google don't like, you will either drop down the ranking or be blacklisted altogether.

Try http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/

Places like that are a good start but if you want the bits that really impress (like authorship) there are other places to look, I tend to look at the technical places as there is less marketing/buzzword speak on them.

Authorship/content ownership is one that is quite new, lets you link your G+ account to a site you blog/write on and treats it as better quality, authored (as opposed to automated) content) It's not actually that hard to do, we did it

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=shout ... e&ie=UTF-8

(top one as an example)

I meant more who actually gets paid to improve it?

It's usually the person who made the site that gets handed that joyous task. Is this something for a website you own, or is it a work thing?

If nobody wants to do it, it's complex and it requires nothing but a brain, time and a computer, I see potential for a business. No?

There are plenty of people / companies out there who claim to be SEO experts. Ok so I'm getting cynical inn my old age but I've heard more complaints than compliments about the so called SEO experts.

Half the problem is that nothing is instantaneous, so you make a change and sit back for a period to see if it has any effect, and the target is always moving, as are the competitors. The old adage "lies damned lies and statistics " comes to mind.

Both Fin and Big D have provided good links as a starting point.

We get emails every day from SEO outfits. Often badly spelled, usually send as Iona list, and always deleted.

The people I know who work on SEO for their jobs don't call themselves SEO experts, it's marketing as there is a lot more to page rankings than just keywords and metadata.


The "SEO business" is flooded with people who do this, some use very iffy tactics that may be white hat but very questionable in delivery (like putting a site aggregator in the footer to combine multiple sites for linking content)

Perfect.

So cynicism aside, there is a business to be had here. If everybody else is [LIFTED] I only have to be honest and a bit good to get ahead of the crowd.

JJ, is your SEO handled in house? Or do you just delete the emails coz they're [LIFTED]?

If you have your website created externally, they should be ensuring that they build the seo into the site.

Gone are the days, where you could enter a bunch of metatags and job done. Now it needs to be included in the design of the site.

The emails are all shiz, but to be honest we don't really care about site hits. It's just not how our business model works.

You have to assume that the copy supplied is well written and full of the kind of keywords customers would be using to search for. You try getting a client to apply themselves to that....

Not only that, but Google’s ranking is based on relevancy and accuracy of content. Links in to the site are counted, and are weighted depending on their relevancy AND authoritativeness. So, for example, your website about Daleks will fare far better on Google if the BBC links to it than if your friend’s Blogger page links to it. You can’t really make the BBC link to your Dalek website, but if they do then you’ve scored a winner: your content must be top notch to get that kind of kudos. A link is seen as an endorsement in this respect.