Living The Good Life 

Should You Get SEO-Certified?

In addition to the brick and mortar company I run, I'm author/editor of at least five blogs. When I'm not blogging, I do part time SEO Consulting work for companies to sharpen my skills. The clients never stop coming but I sometimes wonder: should I get SEO Certification?

I toy with this thought because certification might consolidate reputation and bring additional income. Then again, not. So I spent the night jotting down the pros and cons of getting that certificate.

Thumbs Up:

• A piece of paper means a lot to some people. Lets face it- credentials come on a piece of paper. Someone is said to be a 'celebrity doctor' if big clients talk about his miraculous cures at parties and his clinic hangs heavy with degrees from Harvard. Without the latter, he may just be a very convincing quack. Or an urban leged . Certification is tangible testimony to excellence.
• You pick up knowledge. Many certification boards like EC-Council provide self-paced coursework that build up personal knowledge. Since certification follows study and fairly rigorous examinations - you feel that you really earned it.
• The sheen of credibility passes on. Certifying bodies maintain a roster of SEO professionals who can be scrutinized. Clients like the facility of doing credit investigation on folks who'll be handling sensitive data- like their websites..

Thumbs down:

• Search engines mutate. What you know today may not hold tomorrow. Till today, no one really understands the google algorith. Everything is educated speculation. So unless you keep learning beyond the courseware of certifying bodies, your skills rapidly reek of obsolencence.
• SEO isn't the Excalibur of online business I know that Everton doesn’t even use SEO to his ConnectedInternet.co.uk, and still he pulls in 2000+ RSS subscribers.This proves that SEO and link building isn't the only means to drive massive traffic to a website.
• The final authority on search engine expertise are the search engines themselves- but do you think Google would ever spill its guts and open an SEO school? That would be like giving the keys to thieves in the night!

At this point, I'm still unsure if I want to be certified, but for those who do, do consider the following bodies.

SEOCertification.org.

ExpertRating.

OnlineWebTraining.

Search Engine College

Fly high and dominate!