Store merchants do need to heed your advice to learn about SEO to tell the difference between the real experts and the snake oil salesmen. Do merchants need experts to write their content? No. But can experts guide you in how to write the content, how to tell if your pages are rankings, how competitive are your keywords, etc… The answer is certainly yes.

Paul

But I have to say that I disagree that search engine optimization is some kind of rapidly changing thing that requires you to do something different today than you would have done 5 years ago.

In addition to my Yahoo Stores, I have a bunch of informational web sites. Many of those sites have been sitting at the top of the major search engines for years and years (since 2000 or before), with no changes at all on my part.

I believe that the goal of any search engine is to provide quality information to searchers. So as long as you are creating unique, valuable information in a basically search engine friendly way and you work on getting relevant links like Rob Snell describes in the Yahoo for Dummies book and his recent post example, you can’t go wrong.

The hard part isn’t the SEO per se. It is creating valuable, unique content to begin with.

SEO specialists aren’t magic. They can’t write the content for you, because they aren’t the expert in your business or your subject — you are.

In the end, YOU have to create the content anyway, if you want it to be accurate. It’s not like you can just hand over your site to some guy and say, “Get me to the top of the search engines, pronto!”

If you go with an SEO specialist, you have to be careful to go with someone legitimate like Karl here.

I get cold calls from so-called SEO specialists all the time who claim that there is “something wrong with my web site” that they have to fix. Sometimes I take the calls, just to screw with them. They inevitably tell me that my “meta tags” are wrong or something equally ridiculous.

If they are so great at SEO, then why are they cold calling me?

If you don’t know anything about SEO and treat it like it’s something that “someone else” should do instead, you can’t even tell the difference between the legitimate experts like Karl and the con artists who will take your money and screw up your site.

I think that basic search engine literacy at the very least is absolutely essential in running an online business.

You need it even if you are going to pay an expert to help you, so that you can understand if they are legitimate, and if they are doing ethical, proper things to your site.

PS I’m not ripping on Karl. He obviously knows his stuff!

I am just saying that Yahoo Store owners need to at least have a basic understanding of how this stuff works too, because their businesses depend on it.