Hireling somebody with experience and proven knowledge about search to do your in-house search marketing was impossible. You had to take a person’s word for it and watch if the results eventually reflect what he had promised and what you expected during the job interview.

“Growing” staff in-house from an inexperienced rookie to a valuable asset was often the best option. The former graduates and newbie’s became experienced marketers with the time and made it hard for companies to be able to keep them. They learned quickly what their work and experience was worth. Those People did often quit their job at the company where they learned the business to work for a specialized search-marketing firm or to start their own business.

Independent training and certification did not exist.

Changing Landscape

The landscape regarding education and certification changed dramatically since the middle of 2006. Before 2006 did virtually no or only a few training curriculums to internet marketing, especially to the fast growing subject of search engine marketing and optimization exist, at least none, which resulted in an industry wide accepted form of certification that could be used by the students who successfully completed the training to use with confidence for a job application.

Combined industry efforts and the shortage of skilled internet marketing professionals created a boom in new services, which offer new training courses and seminars including certification to various internet-marketing subjects. Not all certifications are accepted or acknowledged across the industry, but most of them offer at least a similar level of education, which makes 3rd party certifications almost in all cases just as good as an “official” one.

Broad Selection of Services

The offers vary in price, amount of transferred knowledge and distribution method. Self-learning courses in printed and electronic format online are as available as hands on training classes in real classrooms with real teachers and interaction with other students. In addition, the combination of virtual training online combined with interaction with real teachers and other students is in some cases an option.

Companies can now send their employees who might have a major in marketing and advertising or computer engineering to a paid training and know when they come back and passed the exam and got their certification that they do know at least the basics of the job they are supposed to do.

Graduates Are in High Demand

The demand for graduates from the new available colleges, training programs and online classes is high and successful alumni in subjects like SEM/PPC or Leeds SEO can often choose from more than one job offer available to them. Classes are usually very affordable ranging between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

Finding Job Openings

If you are looking for a job in the search marketing industry, or if you are a personnel manager and looking for SEM professionals to hire, you might want to have a look at the niche job search site JobsInSearch.com, which specializes in search engine optimization (Leeds SEO) and marketing jobs and careers. There are also the large and generic career opportunities portals and sites where you can look for job openings in search engine optimization, pay-per-click and internet marketing in general.

Conclusion

Times are certainly changing and the realm of the one-geek shows is slowly ending. The industry matures at last.

What led, at the time, to what many would have said were very rash moves? After all, reciprocal linking was still being expounded, by all and sundry, as an essential way to get a good ranking, and the software tools were being actively marketed still. Search engine positioning software was still being heavily marketed and is still today; keyword density was a buzz term being branded around as if it were an essential science to be practised by all good Bristol SEO conscious webmasters.

What I did was to go back to marketing basics. I had received my marketing training back in the 1980′s and had practical marketing experience with my own business from the mid 1990′s. I was not born into internet marketing alone, so could still see outside the blinkers and the hype.

A very basic but important aspect of marketing is to know your market place. When it comes to search engine rankings, then clearly a major part of that market was the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, with Google being the clear leader then, and a year later today.

I started to think 18 months ago that as far as reciprocal linking went, it was becoming a spammers’ zone. Surely, I argued with myself, Google did not really want to rank a web site highly just because the web master had the tools and the time to chase around getting reciprocal links? It just did not make sense. And the same was true of buying links. Why should a web site rank highly because they have splashed out on buying links?

What Google, and the others, really wanted was to rank the best web sites for a particular search term, and it seemed only a matter of time before they sniffed out and extinguished the abuses such as blatantly artificial link building, Blog spam, scraping and extreme Bristol SEO’ing.

A year ago, I started two new web sites without any real thought of Bristol SEO. As a writer, I was happy to try to provide what search engines wanted: original content on what people were searching for. While I did provide title and description tags, everything else was just written on a go with the flow basis. The keyword phrase for any page would come out in the natural flow. I could just write to my heart’s content without using any tools checking keyword density.

The first of those new web sites 13 months ago was in the self improvement niche, which is highly competitive. I was expecting to be Sandboxed by Google because of that, and so it proved. But I just kept plugging away, sticking to my no-Bristol SEO principle. Of course, none of us outside Google knows for sure if there is such a thing as a sandbox, but there is undoubtedly a waiting time before a new site is thrown fully into the ranking melting pot.

In the self improvement case, the last Google update saw my site emerge from the sandbox after about 12 months. So, at last, I was able see whether my no Bristol SEO approach was to yield any positive results. Thankfully, a few high rankings were immediately apparent, including a few #1 positions. On one of those terms, Yahoo followed a few weeks later to the #1 position, while the site was #2 (now 1) at MSN.

Now, this is early days for that particular site, and there is much to do to get more high rankings. However, I am confident that Bristol SEO is infinitely more simple than some experts, especially those selling ranking tools, tend to have you believe.

Since I started that particular site, I have only made one major change, and that is convert all my web sites to CSS. Providing a content rich site that is easy to crawl for search engine robots is the most important aspect of the new, simplified Bristol SEO. In fact, following Google’s advice to webmasters is about all you need to do, and that is free.

Of course, those with software products to peddle will argue that I could do even better with their software. But if Google decides to blacklist that software as a manipulating tool, then all my hard work could be undone. So I will leave the others to chase shadows with ranking software, and just enjoy writing content. After all, that is what basic marketing told me to do.