I had originally intended this to be a reply to http://www.johnon.com/694/seo-kickbacks.html but it was deemed “a bit spammy” 
At fourteen years of age I was just old enough to be around during the Hippie days, sort of, when the “Establishment” was anyone who was established and holding power. Web designers don’t start out as SEOs, they start out building small sites for local businesses and friends (the way I did when I was in IT working on networks in Manhattan). My fellow network engineers sneered at web designers, calling them idiots and losers… but I thought it would be a great creative outlet and started designing sites. Optimization “help” came from an old friend who had been an SEO in the dot com days running a site called ApartmentFashion.com that made millions of dollars, receiving hundreds of thousands of hits a week – and her advice was essentially to stuff a lot of keywords, and get reciprocal links. Well, of course, she being one of the “old guard” and I figured who would know better, I went ahead and did it. But it was 1993 and it didn’t work any more (I didn’t have the heart to tell her, she’d been out of the business a few years) and so I sought to learn SEO on my own. Three years of “in-between” learning while I worked on networks didn’t teach me much, a few dozen books and seven hefty web developers proposals Hernando County gave me to dissect and translate into English for them so they could hire a firm began getting me in shape, and one day I noticed that I was getting a few page one results for key phrases competing against fifty million other pages. I figured I was ready to make a decision about becoming an SEO so I could help people make money from the web. I bought some tools, paid for some services, read more books and blog posts and went to SEO Meet-ups in Tampa.
Twitter was a big wakeup for me though. In spite of many established Old Guard SEOs using it, most are cliquish and very few have an interest in following back. My “toys” aren’t as refined and I don’t have the advantage of the dot com day money earned to build a company of any size, so I work all day and hand out advice to my paying clients struggling to understand why writing to their blogs, linking to their product landing page, and tweeting a blog link to their followers (with a Googleable keyword or two) could get them a few more visitors, more keywords ranking in Google, more email newsletter signups and maybe, just maybe, some steady sales. They have to be reminded, retaught, encouraged and stroked.
They twit and tweet, gobble and Google, and jet set around the world – twittering their little fingers away on their magical BlackBerries, Gadgets and iPhones – the Old SEO Guard, with their mighty ranking aged domains (which, like fine old aged wines, only get better with time), judged by Google to be the very finest in the land.
After all, not only do they have reams and reams of virtual pages pumped out by teams of writers and guest and ghost bloggers, but they also have fine old back links from authority web sites that linked to them way back when in the dot com days (when there wasn’t much else to link to). They don’t want to meet, they don’t want to mingle… not with the new SEOs (Hell no!). Sell them something? Sure, otherwise they jealously hoard their valuable link equity and their secret techniques, and pass them on to very few. …most certainly not to the upstart start-ups, the new know nothing empty headed SEOs of the web today.
I predict that tomorrows SEOs that are starting out today will know more than the established SEOs of today for the same reason stuffing keywords no longer works. Technology doubles every two years and is obsolete in three. Constantly struggling is what advances new SEOs. Working on the computer 10 to 16 hours a day I could use a couple more friends who at least speak the SEO lingo, and so could a bunch of other newer SEOs, but we will have to form our own groups and do it our own way – we’re offered no choice. I tell the new ones “If you’re new to SEO – you can expect to be ignored.” Read more on my previous post about Bigger better toys.
