The importance of SEO in your online marketing efforts is no longer under dispute. For your website to contribute positively towards your business, it has to be found by people searching for relevant products and /or services.  And since searchers rarely look beyond page 1 of the Google results page (that’s right, page two is not good enough), your website has to be in the top on page 1.

Enter…The SEO Experts
With little or no knowledge about successful SEO strategies, you may feel the best option is to hand over SEO into the capable hands of an ‘SEO Expert’. Now comes a tricky question. Is SEO a precise science or lucky guesswork? Do the said SEO experts base their strategies on precise scientific principles or is it just a random application of general techniques that (sometimes) hits the nail on the head to get the desired results. And if indeed it is guesswork, are SEO agencies justified in charging such exorbitant fees? Let us examine the issue in detail.
“SEO Takes Time to Work”
This is one of the most common phrases you hear whenever you approach any SEO agency, big or small. SEO experts go to great lengths to convince you that SEO results are not apparent overnight. Considerable time must elapse before the website acquires a high ranking. This perhaps is an indication that they are themselves in the dark as to what will work and need time to figure things out.
But in all fairness, they do assure that though results may take time to manifest, they would be sustainable. Meaning though your website takes long to reach the top, it will remain there for long. So maybe these SEO experts do know what they are doing.
Perhaps SEO is Combination of Science and Guesswork
The key SEO techniques are based on precise scientific principles. For instance, consider keyword optimization. By ensuring a measurable keyword density across the content and optimal keyword placement such in the title, first line and last line, it is possible to attract the attention of search engines towards your website. This is a scientific process.
But keyword determination is often not a precise science. Yes, the SEO agency does carry out extensive research and looks at the relatively rankings of various relevant keywords. But often intuition does play a key role. Or a creative tweak can greatly enhance the relevance of the keyword. Or it is possible that someone stumbled on the perfect keyword purely by accident. (Chances of this being made public is not high for obvious reasons).
Coming to the other important SEO technique, link building, the same holds true. While the selection of the websites to link with are determined by precise factors such as their page rank, relevance etc, the comments generating the link, the anchor text  etc are more a result of creative processes and involve some degree of guesswork
In Conclusion
We may say that only professionals who are well aware of the scientific principles of SEO can indulge in lucky guesswork that will produce results. It is like when a seasoned cook says ‘a pinch of any ingredient’. The cook can afford to guess the ‘pinch’ because he is an expert. Same is true of SEO experts.
On that note “Happy Cooking”…er.. Website Building with SEO.