Got a call today from a guy I know quite well after he sat through a pitch from an SEO company who were talking about Expert SEO Strategies and he wanted to know my opinion of what they said.

They gave him a 90 minute presentation on why he should pay them £5k a month, and it was apparently all based around there concept of using "their Expert SEO Strategies", now first at £5k a month I would not be too hopeful of getting real SEO Strategy, secondly after 90 minutes they still had not told him what any of these strategies are or how they tested them!  So its the usual "SEO as a Black Art" pitch, based on instilling Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) and talking about expertise, blah blah blah.  I hate this kind of pitch, I think it gives real SEO professionals / experts / strategists a raw deal.

Real experts in any field test, test and test again so that they know the limits of what they are doing, they understand tolerances to a very detailed level and know just how far they can push stuff.  A real SEO expert will in most cases always have a load of tests running somewhere, they will have proper test harnesses setup and will have quality metrics defined and base-lined, they will not only do single test but variant testing to handle as many scenarios as possible. They will have aged test beds that they use to monitor key industry indicators to avoid false positives / negatives in there test beds.

Consequently an Expert SEO Strategy is something that's tested to destruction in a safe environment before it ever sees the light of day, even if the idea behind the strategy is someone else's, it gets tested and run through multiple scenarios within a controlled and base-lined environment.  

So if someone comes and talks about there expert Seo Strategies, even if they tell you what they are (its fair enough if they wont tell you too much detail on there strategies before you hand over some dosh) what you really need to understand is what testing has been done on these strategies.

So don't judge a strategy on how impressive the strategy sounds but on how impressive the testing that has been done on the strategy is.