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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Why not just learn what there is to learn yourself. It's not exactly rocket science.

One of the first major lessons of being an entrepreneur for me was that even though I probably could do everything myself it was not economical and not feasible to actually do everything myself.

That probably was the first lesson, but I still spent another two decades before it fully sank in.

There are many things that, even though not rocket science, are quite specialist in nature and it takes time and experience to get to the level where you can do just as good a job as a specialist.

I worked for a guy who set up a very successful online business here in Padova, and, yeah, he certainly didn't try and do it all. "SEO" was something he very much had a handle on though, because the site lived or died by its web presence. He brought in a couple of potential consultants to interview, but they all seemed to not really have any knowledge that we didn't already posses internally.

So - yeah, delegate, but some things you can't delegate. No idea about their business in particular, but for a lot of online businesses, keeping track of the basics is probably something you ought to have a feel for yourself.

It's similar to the idea that tech startups are most likely better off not outsourcing their development work.

The golden rule seems to be 'trust but verify', and a little bit of knowledge goes a long way during the 'verify' stage.

They may be too busy focusing on other areas of business. If so, then definitely bring in someone else.

However, I'm curious about your "not rocket science" comment. I've always generally agreed with you, but I've been watching a lot of twist lately and Calacanis keeps saying stuff about SEO guys making crazy salaries ($100k - $200k/yr). If it's really that simple, how are some guys pulling that much $?

You can make 200k selling snake oil in many fields, including SEO. That doesn't imply SEO is hard. That said, SEO at strategic levels is nontrivial, like marketing, and is worth millions in direct sales to many firms.

SEO seems to attract a lot of snake oil people though. Maybe the recipe "not hard" + "lots of money" attracts a lot of people hoping to cash in.

I think at a minimum I'd only consider hiring someone with actual development skills.

We do some SEO work ourselves, but we run three businesses here, all of them make decent amounts of money. Its not worth us to pull a partner out, have him learn SEO, implement it, etc. We'd rather pay someone that knows what they are doing and let the partners do what they're good at.

If you don't take the time to at least learn the basics and what people are going to do for the money you pay them, my guess is that you'll be an attractive target for more snake-oil salesmen. Once you've learned that, you could pretty much do things yourselves, handing off make-work things to contractors for significantly less money.

We have a pretty good idea on SEO. One of the businesses is a web marketing firm focused on Copy Writing (he's a copy writer). So, we do know the basics and can ferret out BS, but he/we believe good SEO takes time and effort. Neither of which he (or anyone else) has any interest in. Why spend weeks learning and then months implementing SEO, when you can pay someone to do it? His time is more valuable than the presumed cost of paying someone (copy writers also make serious money).

Another good reason to know some of the basic stuff is to make sure that someone does not happily blackhat you straight in to pagerank '0' territory.

As with so many things, the devil is in the details. Here's a simple keyword example:

accounting services and accounting service are different, with substantial gaps in search volume and competitiveness. Do you know which one is worth more? Do you know how much more?

There's an order of magnitude difference between the traffic on nj accounting firms and new jersey account firms. Are you sure you know which is better?

Even if you cultivate a list of hundreds keywords that are relevant, valuable and that you can be competitive in, do you know how to decide which words to try to hit via SEO and which to do via SEM? Do you have a tool that can help you make that decision quickly?

Do you know who your competitors are, what keywords they're winning on, and how strong they are on each, so you can plan an effective attack, leaving them only with the crap you don't want?

Sure, it's pretty easy to say use valid html, use alt tags, use meaningful URLs, have a header, use relevant images, make videos, get links from relevant content with good anchor text, and all the other crap that goes into SEO 101. But when you get into market analysis, competitive analysis, management of link-building campaigns, etc, it gets very involved. I'd expect that it would take smart person a year of working full-time under an expert to be good at it.... and I'd expect it to take them much longer if they're doing a part-time self-guided tour.

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