SEO Germany

SEO Germany - The Great Unknown

In Germany SEO is still a neglected part of internet marketing. German advertisers and agencies mostly didn't grasp yet the high potential of SEO. There are several lively SEO forums around but that's almost all. Search engine optimization was the great unknown until lately. A widely reported SEO contest alleviated the problem just a little. Nonetheless if you watch most of the websites seemingly professional SEO companies have, you might think that they are even to poor to pay a designer.

Personally I know only one real new media agency that is involved in SEO in Germany but a while ago I had to clean up their doorway pages (a well known spam technque) from a clients web site. They wanted to hire me but I refused having by then another contract. They look professional but in their case studies they show results I could top within days as a freelance optimization expert, although they have at least 20 employees. In Germany they can get away with it. Most programmers around here think they can do SEO themselves and many agencies offer optimization services like "meta tag optimization". That's even more outrageous when you take into account that the German speaking population of approx. 100 million spreads over 4 nations, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and, what most people don't even know, Italy.

You Do What?

When people ask me what I do for a living they first chuckle a little or do not understand, than they try to pronounce the German word for SEO. After that they start to wonder if I tell the truth. "Manipulating" search engine results appears to be magic to most of them. Even Internet specialists like web designers often never heard of such a profession. On the other hand most of the blogosphere in Germany assumes that SEO has something to do with spamming, especially with blog spam. I always attempt to bring up the most easily understandable explanation saying sth. like, "I'm the guy that makes your website show up on the first page of the Google results". So either I am a magician or a spammer, but as I sad before, that's no wonder. SEO in Germany is still in the phase the internet was before the boom of the new economy. Back then the media and thus the public associated it with a bunch of thugs trading in illegal XXX or instructions to build bombs.

Difficulties In Finding A White Hat In Germany

Moreover there really is a problem with black hat SEO around here. Most people, even most clients believe that SEO is about "manipulating" results and not enhancing websites, writing new, better content and make it readable for spiders. This misinterpretation goes so far that I often have to disappoint potential clients when they ask me to use tricks. Many of them do not even think of real SEO before asking me for black hat techniques. Of course I refuse. I want to stay in this business for a while so I work on my image as the German specialist for white hat SEO.

I try to work fully compliant with Google and other search engines' guidelines. It's sometimes difficult because Google even dislikes text link ads stating that they undermine the authority of results. If you look for the German term for white hat SEO (ethische Suchmaschinenoptimierung) at Google.de you will me at #1 right now. That's funny because I didn't really optimize for it. Does it mean that I am the only white hat SEO around here? The rest of the Top 5 are German SEO glossaries. So SEO services themselves are much quicker to employ unethical black hat tactics that breach Google's guidelines. Respectable clients new to this business often are unable to distinguish the black and the white hats because the line is even blurry for the experts themselves. Many even fall for services offering search engine submission to over 900 search engines. Probably they don't know that on the German market only three of them have a substantial market share.

Where Do You Come From?

You probably visit by way of one of my friends and partners with websites in English, most notably Technorat Top 30 weblog Google Blogoscoped where I wrote an article about a Polish SEO contest among others or a from the Website of popular phpBB templates designer Jakob Persson. If not make sure to visit them, they're experts in their domains.

Multilingual SEO specialized on the German and Polish market

If you live in the US, you probably don't realize how different and disconnected the two neighbouring countries Germany and Poland are. Those two European neighbours are very different although from afar they might be perceived as more or less the same. In some cases it's true, Polish and German food for instance is very similar. But when it comes to the search engine market they differ substantially as do most of the other European ones btw. If you want to enter the European market I most probably can assist you. If you need a multilingual SEO specialized at SEO for the German and Polish market I'd be happy to assist you optimizing for Germany or Poland. Besides, I also learned Spanish and French. It's maybe not enough to be a SEO copywriter but at least I can find one for you. Hasta la vista!