Last month, the president and co-founder of New York based search marketing company Did-It.com Dave Pasternack, wrote an article for DMNews titled, “Troubled Times for SEO Firms?” The piece builds from the premise that SEOs are self-styled Jedi-Knights who sell common sense expensively repackaged as search engine secret sauce. In it, Pasternack rails against high-priced SEO consultants and practitioners who bill clients on a month-to-month basis. He describes SEO as a front-end process requiring a one-time service.

Pasternack’s original piece tried to conclude on a conciliatory note by stating, “Whatever the outcome, smart marketers will continue to invest in SEO in a way that makes best sense to them, and the best SEO firms will remain in demand, because there remain thousands of commercial Web sites out there in need of basic search engine optimization.”

The piece got under the skins of a bunch of SEOs and Pasternack received a lot of critical response from a number of them, myself included. In a DMNews follow-up, Pasternack replies to critics in an article aptly titled, “An SEO Critic Answers his Critics”. Pasternack again goes on the attack, this time using a medical practice as an …

“… analogy that applies directly to way the SEO industry behaves. When you go to your doctor with a skin condition, what does he do? Unless your doctor is a quack, he does some tests, gets the results back and prescribes an off-the-shelf or prescription medication. You rub this stuff on your skin once a day, once a week, whatever. You might go back and see your doctor in a month or two to evaluate the results of this treatment.

If your doctor behaved the way many in the SEO crowd believe SEO firms should work, he’d run some tests, come up with a treatment plan, but wouldn’t give you the medicine to rub on your skin. He’d keep this medicine (labeled “Super Secret SEO Sauce”) locked up in a vault in his office. Then he’d make a series of appointments for you to come in so that he could rub this medicine on your skin, charging you hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars for each visit.”

Though he makes allowances for more critical conditions that might require in-hospital care, Pasternack is pretty sure that one doesn’t require a professional ointment application specialist to rub skin cream on a rash. While he is probably right about skin care, he is simply wrong about the practice of SEO.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that search engine optimization is a mixture of best practice web-design, well-phrased linguistics and community reference (or link) building. Similarly, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to perform SEO services.

Good SEO involves an initial investment in research, an above-average understanding of website design and hosting, strong analytic skills and the ability to work multiple keyword targets into well-written marketing driven copy. That’s the pre-project knowledge base in a nutshell.

Knowing what to do and actually doing it are two different things. Every website is different and on many websites, each internal document presents a unique challenge. Some websites go on forever and some content management solutions create as many questions as they do solutions. SEO is often tedious mind numbing work. That part’s not very sexy so no one writes about it. Some projects last weeks and others last months. Eventually, every marketable page, document and file in the overall site will have been touched in some way. In other words, SEO ain’t easy it just looks that way.

Over time, there are basic nudges one can give to sites but the work SEOs do after finishing the initial work is best measured in the introduction of additional elements such as blogs, new links and placements in alternative search and social venues.

Things change over time, the least of which is the occasional algorithm update from Google or Yahoo. The changes that can sink even the most well crafted SEO campaigns most often come from the clients themselves. New employees making wide-sweeping site updates, the sudden addition of hundreds of pages of new content, and the application of a technique suggested by someone’s buddy’s younger brother’s friend, are three regularly encountered issues. Monthly on-call and maintenance fees charged by several SEO firms exist because the clients tend to need the extra services over time.

Search is everywhere on the web and part of virtually every application. As search leads away from the traditional search engine results pages (SERPs), good SEOs are exploring and learning to work with emerging venues such as vertical engines, social media and audio/video. An imaginative SEO could even make a living in the Second Life universe.

Pasternack is right about snake-oil salesmen selling “special sauce”. That is a very real issue in SEO but consumers are getting far better at spotting the scams. Unfortunately he strays way off course (and way off base) suggesting SEOs apply relatively simple one-time fixes and thereafter bilk clients with absurdly high rates. He fails to appreciate that most SEO firms are small shops built around independent specialists. Either he fails to remember or he has never known the amount of work that goes into a professionally driven SEO campaign.

Sorry Dave. As much as I like Did-it and appreciate how the stuffed frog freaks out my cat (thanks Kevin) I have issues with your issues about SEO.