Seo Is So Easy - Oh Wait No Its Not

Today was the day I was subpoenaed and had to give testimony. It was really interesting. I have never done that before. I had to answer a lot of questions about how search engine rankings work and Google... Eventually it led into quesitons about my blog and how long I retain comments, how addresses of people are logged and then of course to the people that are actually parties in the case Quick Connect vs Schrock Innovations as well as some of Quick Connects former employees I gave about 2 hours of testimony... long time. One thing that was kind of funny was they asked me what SEO was and if I was a SEO and I said no. Then after more questions basically asking about seo and how I was not a seo but I was recognized as a seo I revealed that I think seo is easy. I said its really not something I ever focus on. I have said I think 95% of seo is so easy and really here is why. I really knew nothing about SEO even when I was making fat checks. The first search engine strategies I went to in San Jose 2 years ago I was SO AMAZED talking with "expert seo" people about what they do that they actually charge for that. Everything they said they do for there clients I thought was just... wow you actually charge for that? So ya I know what your thinking tho.. If I am a SEO know it all then why did I need Aaron Wall to bail me out of supplemental hell and that is a very good question. Here is the answer: I am used to coding my own sites from scratch and by me of course I mean Dillsmack and when we code our own sites we do make proper description, title and other tags as well as other obvious stuff. This blog uses wordpress and between categories/pages/ and 50,000+ gallery sid pages indexed the site just lost all its pr distribution. Aaron pointed this out and it took about 20 seconds to make a robot.txt file to implement the changes. Tonight I watched a Tivo'd episode of 60 minutes profiling the Geek Squad. I was also astounded by how many people pay for stupid shit like defragging there hard drive or installing new drives... So now I get it. SEO is easy like installing in a new hard drive is easy... or getting a webserver up and running with apache/php/mysql in under a hour is easy. Now some mechanic is sitting there going Ya he thinks seo is easy but adjusting his carburetor is easy or changing his oil is easy.. I guess it just boils down to some basics. You either pay someone to do stuff or do it yourself. What ever makes the most sense and while to my company I think 95% of SEO is super easy to most people its well worth what these 21st car salesman sell them in there SEO package. So ok... To me what is the extra 5% that I think makes SEO's stand out? Its all about what is not obvious to me. I would not even really call most of these people SEO's but I would rather call them people with experience and connections. Take for instance a lot of recent polls on who is the top SEO's. Almost all of them do not do SEO. People like Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan, Jeremy Zwodney ... Are these people really making pages that are optimized for search engines? I think they just have knowledge and connections? Ok onto some examples of what makes a difference with people - lets take Danny Sullivan - He starts a new website searchengineland.com and within the first week is already included in Google and Yahoo news. Did he get any special treatment or break any rules to get included? I doubt it but he does have contacts and also has EXPERIENCE which to me is the extra 5% that really matters. Lets not even mention that he has Google,Yahoo, AND Microsoft as sponsors on his brand spanking new site.. again is this really SEO? No but the combination of being included off the bat in yahoo/google news mixed with revenue off the bat is something I doubt any NEW SITE owner would turn down ;) Other people which have experience and connections I highly recommend from personal experience is Aaron Wall, Greg Boser, and David Naylor. But here is the deal. The guys who actually get the 5% of SEO that make the difference (IMO) you probably cant afford. zomg i write to much