Is it possible to have a Set of Standards for SEO?

I’ve seen a lot of talk about SEO Certification and Standards. There are a lot of SEO pros who like the idea and several who don’t.

The problems I see are;

1. Who gets to set the standards? There area lot of well-known SEO Gurus, some self-proclaimed and others who have been recognized as such by others. But, it’s like name brand products. Just because they are well-known does that automatically mean they are the authority in the SEO community?

We all do SEO differently. There are some basics that everyone does, but then we use our own experience, both successes and failures, to help our clients.

There are times when there is more than one right way to promote a website. Two SEO pros might do it differently and achieve the same results.

So, one might not be using the “standard” method someone else decided on, but still achieve the desired result or possibly even better results because they did something totally different than everyone else. Does that mean they are still wrong because it did not meet those standards?

2. SEO Competition. It also seems to me it would be difficult to get everyone to use a set of standards because we all have to compete with each other in our own business and we have to compete with each other for results for our clients.

If we all did the same exact thing, how does anyone gain the advantage? The best method of SEO hasn’t been invented yet. A new SEO person might come along tomorrow and have a better way to do things than any of us.

However, they would be outside of the standards set by whoever set them. But their results might be beating us all. I think standards make everyone mediocre. It undermines the ability of new rising SEO stars to show their stuff. It inhibits creativity because we are just following some “standard”.

3. Selecting Standards. So, who sets these standards? Do we hold an election? Will it be a popularity contest? Maybe the prettiest SEO Guru gets to set them.

If you set a bunch of SEO pros at a table and discuss SEO, there will be different opinions on how something should be done. Which of them gets to be the one that overrides everyone else’s opinion for the standard?

There are some very popular SEO websites built by some very smart SEO pros. Does that mean they should set the standards? Is their opinion something you follow religiously? Or do you like to march to the beat of a different drummer?

And if you do things differently from what you read at those websites and achieve good results for your client, are you wriong anyway because you didn’t do it the way they told you to?

I’d love to hear your opinion about SEO Standards and how you think it’s possible or impossible to have them.