Call Yourself an SEO at Your Own Risk? Wait, What?
This is one of those issues that seems to keep coming around like a bad penny. Why is it that some SEO professionals feel the need to call themselves something, anything, but an SEO professional? Not everyone feels this way, but some do.
The accepted wisdom would seem to be that the SEO industry has a bad name and people shy away from using this term to describe oneself or company in an effort to not be associate with the practice of SEO. I for one would like to see the evidence for this assessment.
I will make the argument that this race away from calling it SEO is comes from the SEO community itself. Who would want to be associate with same bad apples that use spam emails and deceptive tactics? I know I don`t and I get frustrated from time to time. But can you name a profession that does not have some bad apples? Why then do we feel the need to re-brand the profession? Bad apples will follow no matter what words are used.
Here are a few articles that I found to be interesting about the subject.
HT +Danny Sullivan http://searchengineland.com/an-open-letter-to-derek-powazek-on-the-value-of-seo-27680 and here is another article by Danny http://searchengineland.com/from-my-inbox-more-defense-of-seo-11189
Great post by +Max Minzer on the subject and goes into some depth, great read: https://plus.google.com/u/0/108833983815923249955/posts/8dUvamjswYQ
Here is an interesting article by +Josh McCoy that gives some reasons why SEO matters. Just in case someone does question the value in SEO. You can call it what you want but it`s still SEO: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2216870/How-to-Prove-the-Value-of-SEO-in-10-Minutes?
Even Google embraces the practice of SEO: https://support.google.com/webmasters/checklist/1095542?rd=1
and this https://support.google.com/webmasters/checklist/1095542?rd=1
When people ask me what I do for a living, I don`t get shunned, I get questions.
Everyone is free to call themselves whatever they want. I`m not convinced that renaming SEO to something else is a worth while endeavor. Do we really need a new name?
