It was a time when I could put on my headphones, turn on my favorite music and tune out the world as I analyzed rankings, counted keywords, tweaked meta tags and bolded specific phrases.

To me this is search marketing. It’s not always the grand long term plans that make the difference, it’s the small changes that can have the most impact sometimes. Should I punctuate my title tag and throw off my character count? Should I use commas in my keywords tags? All these simple little questions that, while I do deal with on a daily basis, I was able to actually work on myself and see the results.

Sometimes I think it is the big consultants who miss out on this stuff.

You see, too often we in the industry have clients to which we say “go and write your content to target both your user and the engines” and generally they ask one of two questions: “How?” Which is relatively easy to answer and “Why?” Which is harder but not impossible.

Now, you can give them the canned response. You know the one I’m talking about – we all use a variation of it: “You write for your user by ensuring the text is compelling enough to encourage them to click. You write for engines by ensuring “x” number of keyword occurrences happen every “y”times within the body text” or something to that effect. It’s a pat answer. It’s a safe answer.

But sometimes you get caught when they ask why?

Now again, there is a pat answer to why, but when the client digs deeper because they aren’t satisfied with your response, you can get stumped.

It is the hands on experience that you need to maintain to help you really answer why. Without it, one day you will get caught by a client who asks why. I’ve seen it happen time and time again when a “consultant” who hasn’t got their hands dirty in quite a few months or years gets asked the most basic of questions, but they can’t answer because their knowledge isn’t up to date.

This is why I have a stable of hands on clients, and also why I have an assortment of my own sites. Because I can test on my sites and if successful I move it to my clients. Then if it’s still successful (which in most cases it is) I make it part of my consulting routine.

It is also because of this hands on routine that I can answer questions like “what is the sandbox.” Because I’ve seen the effects and I’ve experienced what could be considered a “sandbox” (it’s not really a sandbox by the way. You can read my opinion of it here) so I can explain it to my clients.

In fact most of my knowledge is hands on. I can explain why a blog is beneficial because I’ve seen my own blogs take off. I’ve set up search engine friendly discussion forums and designed search engine friendly web sites on my own, so I can properly walk clients through what they need to do.

You see, I’ve earned my SEO education differently than many others in the industry. I’ve learned it through doing, while many merely read through a few search engine forums and proclaim themselves “experts.” Granted, there are those that are more technically inclined than me, and some have more true marketing experience than me, but no too many can combine practical knowledge with a vision of the future to devise an all encompassing search marketing strategy to take them through the next year or two.

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