If you’ve ever looked into the ever changing world of SEO (search engine optimisation), you’ll know that it is a topic that is forever changing and is subject to the whims of computers. But with the ever increasing cost of paying Google every time someone clicks a link back to your website, SEO is something you probably know you need to learn more about.

There are various different approaches you can take to fill in your knowledge gap:

• Pay someone else to use their skills.
• Learn the skills yourself from books and online sources.
• Hire an SEO mentor to guide you through the whole process, whether you’re going to hire an SEO expert or use the processes yourself.

The problem with the first approach is that you actually have to know a bit about the subject before you are qualified to hire an SEO expert. I’ve met countless people who thought they knew enough about the subject but were badly burned because the expert they hired used techniques that got short term results but wrecked the long term potential of their site or because the “expert” was stuck in the past and using techniques that worked a few years ago but no longer work or any one of a number of reasons.

Using a mentor as a sounding board and a second pair of eyes could have paid for itself many times over.

Moving on to learning the skills yourself, this is a thankless and never ending task. Google practices what the Japanese call “kaizen” or the art of continuous improvement. What that means is that many of the techniques that used to work no longer work.

In the years that I’ve been on the internet, we’ve moved full circle in some areas. For instance, reciprocal linking (where I link to your website if you link to mine) used to be all the rage and worked well for a while. Then it got too easy to manipulate as programs like Zeus made automation as simple as clicking a few buttons. So Google discounted reciprocal links. Nowadays, it’s often more difficult to get a true reciprocal than it is to get a one-way backlink from an article or a guest post. Google’s algorithm knows this and there are quite a few people in the SEO who are quietly focusing again on this kind of link.

That’s just one example of the changes that happen all the time in SEO world. There are hundreds of changes to the search algorithm every single year. A handful get publicity because they affect a percentage or two of searches. But the rest just slip through, uncommented on by anyone except the thankless software engineer who spotted a way to make the results you see slightly better in a relative handful of circumstances.

Chances are you won’t notice many of these changes unless you’re unfortunate enough to be hit by one of them.

But the chance of you keeping up to date with even the major changes is low. Especially if you want to sort the wheat from the chaff on the opinions you read.

Again, that’s where an SEO mentor can make all the difference. It’s their job to know their industry well. And to know where to turn when they hit something that they’re not sure about. And then advise you of the best practices that you can either implement yourself or pay someone to put into practice for you.

If you’d like to know more, contact me for a free initial consultation.