A couple years ago I almost totally stopped writing because of the grammar police. Seems every time I write something one of these grammar cops want to stop by and tell me everything I did wrong. And they always explain how, while my sites look good, my unprofessional writing style has turned them off and will turn off most everyone else that comes to my site.

About the only thing I dislike more than the grammar police are the black hat police.

These are SEO’s that feel that their job is to point out and explain what is and what isn’t black hat. To say that building more than one site and linking those sites together is blackhat is stupid to say the least.

Let’s take Ted for example.

Ted works for Bill and Bill owns a shoe website that sells all types of shoes. Ted is the salesperson over the Nike division. Ted is the person you would talk to if you had a question about Nike and were to call the number on the website.

Ted gets a lot of questions about different types of Nike shoes, but is limited to what he can add to the website, because the site is a shopping cart. And in order for

Ted to add content to the site it has to be approved by his boss, his bosses’ boss and the marketing department and then it has to be sent to the web design department. It can take months to have information added to the site.

So…Ted being a good hard working employee decides to start his own blog about Nike shoes. Here he can write answers to the common questions and point potential Nike shoe purchasers to the Nike shoe blog. This saves Ted time and potential clients love it because the information is great and they can find the answers to questions they didn’t even think about.

The information is so good that people begin linking to the blog from other sites and the site begins to climb in the search engines. The blog begins to start driving traffic back to the main shoe site. The Nike shoe division grows and begins out selling all the other shoe divisions. The owner of the company starts hiring more employees in order to keep up.

Now the company starts getting calls from customers who want to complement him on the Nike blog, so he decides that each shoe division should have its own blog.

The site now has over 50 different blogs and the managers of the different departments are over each blog. Since it is the same company all the blogs link back to the main site, so people can buy the shoes but also link to one another as one shoe might be a better shoe than another depending on the type of use you want the shoe for.

One day Bill visits a SEO forum where he learns that building multiple sites is a blackhat technique. So he rushes to the office fires Ted (for bringing this blackhat technique into his business) and shuts down all the blogs.

As an immediate result sales start to drop and Bill has to start laying people off.

The sad truth is that what he was doing was not a blackhat technique. Had he or the SEO that was pointing out this blackhat technique used a little common sense they would have seen that Google themselves use more than one website.

But instead of using common sense the blackhat police want to group it all together and call it the same.

I’ve decided to get back into the swing of things and start using Geeks on Steroids again.

I’ve been so caught up in affiliate marketing the last couple years that I’ve pretty much neglected my main business.

Believe it or not Geeks on Steroids originally started out as a search engine optimization company but got pushed into doing more web design work, then search engine optimization work. As time went on we started marketing our own sites in the social media areas as well as with the search engines and stopped doing marketing for clients.

I turned the web design business over to employees and have spent the last 3 years in affiliate marketing. About the only thing I’ve done for Geeks on Steroids in the past 3 years was in marketing them on the social networking sites as well as the search engines for web design terms. But now that is all about to change.

I am coming back into the day to day business with Geeks on Steroids and we will be doing less web design work and more search engine marketing work.

Have you ever wondered how to figure out if a search engine optimization company is all that they claim to be?

I’ve been making my living online for the last 8 years and as a web design I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of search engine optimization companies. Most of the ones I deal with are the well established ones that spend a lot of time on forums and blogs. And most of them know what they are talking about, but that is only half the battle.

Optimizing and ranking a website in the search engines is a long and tedious battle. It takes either someone or a team of someone’s that are able to sit in front of a computer day after day and work with your site, tweaking it, changing it and getting links to it.

And when nothing happens, instead of getting discouraged they look for the problem and a solution to that problem. Then they dive in and start working once again to get the web page to rank and they continue this day after day page after page.

Search Engine Optimization is a never ending battle and it goes beyond websites like Google, MSN and Yahoo into sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Understanding how it all works is just the first step in optimizing and getting a website to show up in the search engines.

The SEO community went after Charles Preston pretty hard over the weekend. I went after Verified SEO, (his main site) only to see if I could rank above all the other SEO’s that were targeting that name. Last time I checked I was #1.

Charles Preston’s heart very well could have been in the right place but the fact that he owns an SEO service and wanted access to other SEO’s clients seem a bit bothersome to me. But then that’s just me.

But this post is not really about Charles Preston, it is more about the SEO community as a whole.

The SEO industry has been plagued for years with a lack of consistency and understanding of SEO terms and definitions.

Forums are full of inaccurate information as SEO’s try to understand the industry were they sell their services.

I find it funny the number of SEO’s that spend their days on forums posting about search engine optimization yet, their sites are no were to be found in the search engines.

I don’t know the answer to the problem that plagues the SEO community; I do agree that Charles Preston is not the answer, unless he is willing to get rid of his SEO business.

But at the same time I am equally sure that Edward Lewis isn’t the answer.

I am really confused by the number of SEO people that feel the need to be hired before the website is started. The website needs to be designed to be SEO friendly and built for conversion.

Once the designer is finished with his part of the process you can add your two cents about the conversion end of it and if you have the first clue about what you are doing you should be able to take the site from there and start tweaking it.

We designed a website for an SEO company not long ago and this guy didn’t even know what the heck and ftp program was. How can you be tweaking websites if you don’t even know what tools are used to put them online?

If you want to be a good SEO and then you need to understand how the design process works and be smart enough to stay out of the way and let the designer do his part. I can tweak a site a heck of a lot faster than I can try and explain to someone else how to tweak it.

At the end of the day it has to be about the client making money, if it’s not then it want take long for him to fire you because he’s not making money and doesn’t have the money to pay you. The sooner you can get the site online, the sooner you can start working with the site and get it to the point that it is making an income. Playing around with the designer is nothing more than wasting time and money that most clients don’t have to waste and most designers don’t either. SEO’s need to learn to get the heck out of the way let the designer finish the site and then you come in and do your thing.