If only identifying expertise in other areas were this easy. I had a college professor who always said "Cream always rises to the top." The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure he's wrong. People can achieve extraordinary things but still lack the other resources to make their achievements known. There are, for example, hundreds, maybe thousands, of computer programmers who's phenomenal work is attributed to a manager, a CEO or a company. While that programmer is often happy that their talent was finally discovered and utilized - hardly anybody knows their name.
Another problem we encounter when trying to identify expertise is our susceptibility to charisma and preference of style. For instance, the concept of great leadership is often confused with "He makes me feel good (or conversely, bad)", while we're being led out of profitability and led into the poorhouse - or worse. I'm not picking on leaders here - I think leadership is a very sophisticated skill. My point is that as humans we're very limited in our ability to separate our feelings from objective standards.
The final, and most notable reason we can't easily and accurately identify expertise, is that it often requires an expert to separate the posers from the genuine article, in any given field. For instance, I wouldn't know an expert mechanic from a manicurist - except for the dirty fingernails (on the mechanic you dipstick!).
SEO Experts are Different
What if you could have walked up to Michelangelo and measured the size of his iris, the shape of his hand, and the density of the neurotransmitters in his hypothalamus and determined he was an expert fresco painter. Well this is exactly the type of precision categorizing we can do in identifying an expert SEO. Go to the search engine you want to succeed in and type in "SEO Expert" (or better yet, use my SEO Rank Calculator). The person who comes up number one is the best SEO expert (who has time to work on his own site - I know, it's not me - yet). You could search geographically and search for "SEO expert Minneapolis" and find the best in your city (I might be there). If you want to be more specific, find the SEO Expert who works on the site that rates highest for your most desirable keyword - he/she is the SEO you want working on your site.
Now the important question. Can anyone help me find a good auto mechanic?
I thought I'd illumine the world with the process of how I came up with the idea of SEO Rank. If this really gets your juices flowing, later we can calculate the value of Pi to 10,000 decimal places.
I was thinking the other day that we need a better way to track our SEO progress. We need to find one measuring stick that we can use to measure all the hard work we do to improve site positions for any given keyword across all the top search engines. So I created one.
I call it SEO Rank (I hope I didn't step on anyone's toes there) and it measures the effectiveness of your SEO efforts...
I found a couple of problems in the SEO Rank Calculator 1.0 that I fixed in SEO Rank Calculator 1.1. This new version fixed a bug that prevented Google from parsing properly which occasionally dropped a site from it's position. The SEO Rank Calculator tool calculates SEO rank by assigning weight to the top five search engines according to overall U.S. search volume and returns a number between one and 100. You can still get the source code when you register for free at the site. The SEO Rank Calculator tool and an explanation of the calculation can be found at http://www.danwegner.com/content/view/69/31/.
