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“80pc of SEO consultants are scammers”: Peter Kent, author, SEO for Dummies

SEO for Dummies author Peter Kent has been making some pretty scathing comments about the SEO industry in a new interview:

“Over the last few years as I speak to more clients and hear their stories, it has led me to believe that 80% of the business is scam.” Kent qualifies this remarkable statement by adding: “By that I mean that 80% of people in the business doing SEO consultancy are either running an outright scam, or they thought it was good to get into SEO because it’s a hot area – but they don’t really know what they’re doing.”

Web designers also get it in the neck:

“I have never met a web design company or web design consultant who understands SEO,” he says bluntly. “Don’t trust web designers as far as search engine optimization goes – even if they tell you they understand it, they don’t. I used to say that a few understand it but I’m still waiting for them.”

I suspect he may be exaggerating for effect but you can tell that a number of UK PR consultancies have been seduced into building entirely Flash based sites – which effectively renders most of the content invisible to Google (I know that Google is supposed to be able to index Flash now, but I’ve yet to see the evidence).

However, Just to ensure the article isn’t 100pc tirade, Kent ends with a few tips:

1. Understand your keywords. Do keyword analysis, don’t assume. I always tell people to spend a few bucks and get Wordtracker, spend a few hours, dig around, and do it properly.

2. It’s interesting to hear that people are obsessed with abbreviations. They think it’s important but when they do proper keyword research they often find that the same abbreviation means something different to a different group of people.

Certainly agree on point 1 – never make assumptions about keywords (or anything for that matter. Point 2 has particular relevance to the tech sector which has always been riddled with acronyms and abbreviations.

9 replies on ““80pc of SEO consultants are scammers”: Peter Kent, author, SEO for Dummies”

The secret for high page rank and SEO these days is all down to quality content. Creating quality online content based around relevant keywords increases your Google ranking and increases the likelihood of other websites linking to your pages, again increasing your search ranking.

I completely agree with Kent’s assumption that web designer’s don’t get SEO. I was employed as a firefighter to sort out SEO issues for a company who spent a small fortune on a website by a company who, when you look at their website, also claim that they specialise in SEO and yet made so many basic mistakes it was laughable (the design was pretty crap as well). I like to keep things tight and only work with a few clients so that I get to know them their product and their goals thoroughly before building a strategy.

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