Sometimes I’m a bit jealous of doctors. In order to be a doctor, you have to go through medical school, get specialized training, pass exams, and stay out of trouble. If you call yourself a doctor and you haven’t done those things, you are likely to get arrested.

There’s no such licensing and training required to be a Web site developer or a Search Engine Optimization expert. Anyone can setup a Web site and call themselves one.  I’m not advocating a law like there is for doctor’s, but sometimes it should would be nice! That would stop “so-called” experts from saying things that are factually wrong:

For example, one company features a service for $199/mo which lists the following service as one of the services they include: Meta tag adjustment  (this service was even spelled wrong on their site).  Meta tag adjustment is a waste of time. Don’t believe Curvine — believe Google – here’s what they say “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking…we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.”

Another “expert” offers to automatically submit your Web site to 300+ search engines for only $25! What a steal, right? The problem is that there are only 3 major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo — which gets data from Bing) which make up 95.5% of the US search engine market.  The next two providers ( Ask & AOL) get data from Google and Bing. So it is a complete waste of time and money to submit your site to anyone other than Google and Bing. In fact, both of those services will likely to find your site on their own, as long as it is linked from another site that it knows about. So you’ll likely don’t even need to do anything, much less spend $25.

Save your money! Be careful when spending money on Search Engine Optimization.