Yet another anti-SEO post from someone with a notion that SEO is a band-aid for poorly structured pages and that all SEO professionals are charlatans.
Yes, valid/well structured sites give you an SEO head-start, but there's more to it:
- Properly structured browser titles matter
- The way you write matters
- Sitemaps matter
- Optimizing Flash-based sites/pages is important because there are a lot of them
- Links matter ... A LOT
There is a valid need for honest, skilled SEO professionals. The fact that there are so many bogus ones simply underscores this. Businesses on the web simply need to be educated on when and how to find a good one, when not to use one, and what they can DIY.
I'm sorry, but this post doesn't show much "intellectual honesty".
Anything that 'matters' you should be doing anyways for a good user experience. So explain what this 'optimization' for search engines exactly is?
Titles? That is for the user. Sitemaps? Actually they don't matter as long as your content is linked to internally. They can be produced trivially anyways if you really feel the need, but Google finds all my pages. Optimizing flash pages? That sounds like frowned upon injection. You should not change the way you write for a search engine. Have anchor text that represents what you are linking to? Come on, thats how it should be regardless. The best thing you can have is backlinks - which good content/interesting sites should naturally develop.
I don't know of a single thing you should do to optimize your site for a search engine. edit: If you are downmodding me be because this is incorrect, speak up.
What an utter waste of space (other than, perhaps, as a conversation starter?).
SEO means lots of things to lots of people, and certainly big slices of it are crap.
Here are a few bits of SEO that I'd defy anyone to call bullshit:
1) Unique and descriptive title tags, so that results in Google are findable and make sense when they are found (title tags are used for the "blue link" part of the SERP).
2) Meta descriptions in the event that Google doesn't use bits of the content (not uncommon) to describe to the searcher what's on the other side of your link (this is the 155 or so characters of black text under the link)
3) Keyword research to understand how your customers look for you-- so you can use words that they search for when you have that choice to make. Is your ecommerce site selling "shoes" or "footwear"? "Steaks" or "meat"?
4) Backlinks. Sorry, but this is the currency of the web. If you aren't in the business of trying to be link-worthy and encouraging folks to link to you, you'll fall behind those who are.
5) Eschewing ajaxy guitar solos so that your content is consumable by search spiders.
This is dumb, and essentially the same conversation that was had a week ago. I'll repeat what I said then:
A job is anything someone will pay you to do, and as long as there are companies that will pay employees to help them achieve better results on Google, SEO is and will remain a job.
From the [original] article: "Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime (sic)"
True. Anyone can also be a great cook and keep a house clean in their spare time, but that doesn't mean chefs and housekeepers don't have "real jobs."
I'll agree that there are a lot of overpaid SEO "consultants" who do nothing more than add META tags and ALT attributes and get paid $100+/hr to jerk off the rest of the time. However, speaking as an ex-employee of a company who has 3 results on Google's first page for "health insurance," there are legitimate companies out there who would drown if they didn't have SEO experts working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.
> working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.
If I did that kind of thing - actual work, I think I'd find a different thing to call myself to differentiate myself from the snake oil salesmen.
Still though, even that kind of thing strikes me as kind of "zero-sum"-ish... not really adding a lot of value to the world at large. Tournaments (search engine rankings in this case) are zero-sum, aren't they? Not that that's a reason it's "bullshit", but not high on my list of "people making the world a better place" either.
Many of the SEO best practices can be implemented without taking away from the user experience. However, once the SEO crap starts taking away from the user experience...Stop.
I hesitate to wade into this, especially this late to the party, but what the heck...
I think a major fallacy of the crowd around here is to see SEO as primarily just code/content optimization. Good HTML, page structure, and tagging is a bit of an art, but business as usual to any top flight developer.
The elephant in the room with SEO is paid links. You may have a wonderful validating, user friendly page, but if your competition has 1000 backlink lead on you, you'll never see the top SERP spot for big keywords. Viral content can certainly help, but the unpredictable nature (esp of the links) tends to keep it in second place.
I think most programmers consider paid links 'beneath' them, and most marketers don't understand it (and technically it's grounds for a google ban, but that's only in blatant cases in my experience), but in reality:
1) Identifying proper backlink candidates, in your niche, and tracking contact info down
2) Crafting a non-spammy pitch, and following up on it
3) Making a deal, optimizing the link, and keeping it up to date
is not only a skill set to be mastered, it's a full time job for any site of large size.
Of course throwing down a technically sound site with good content is job #1 for any of us, but the idea that that alone will get you traffic, especially if your idea isn't novel/brilliant, is awfully optimistic. We all want to be Twitter, but somebody out there is getting rich selling wrenches, and the publicity/viral opportunities take real work to master.
Finally, many of the services good SEOs offer like advanced site analytics, integration with PPC campaigns, etc, can be major ROI gainers. They're not necessarily SEO, but they tend to fall under that community's expertise.
whew All that said, I too believe that 80% of the SEO experts out there are hawking snake oil, or black hat google-bomb of the month stuff that will have negative repercussions, but the idea that the whole industry is bunk comes from a large number of people that either all have a brilliant, novel idea, or are missing a serious ROI opportunity.
A lot of SEO can be done as you're building a site, but there are certain aspects to be made aware of. Unfortunately, too many companies sell these BS packages and belittle true SEO, instead of delivering actual results.
He'd also have more of a leg to stand on if he had given some _reasons_ to back his statements.
What this should say, is that SEO as an INDUSTRY is bullshit, proper search engine optimization should just be taken into account as you build whatever you're putting on the web. SEO is a feature not an app in startup terms
I was once involved in an SEO/PPC pitch for a major pizza company (by major I mean one of the top 3 players). One of the issues they wanted addressed was their ranking for the term 'pizza'. This is not something you'd think would be an issue for a company like this, but they weren't showing up on the first page of results.
We suggested that they might want to include the word 'pizza' somewhere on their homepage. That's right. The word pizza wasn't in the title, the meta-tags, the alt-tags, the body copy- it wasn't anywhere on the page. Apparently, that little tidbit had gotten lost among all the priorities of Branding, Marketing, Messaging, Promotions, etc., etc.
As soon as they added the word pizza into their title tag, they rocketed to the top of the results. Was that value worth paying for? Of course. Was the solution totally obvious? It should have been, but in case after case we find that, especially with larger/older companies, it's not.
IMO, SEO is completely natural at the one-man-sized-business level. Like most things, it gets increasingly complicated as you scale up.
If you think SEO is bullshit, you are probably isolated in web-app-make-believe-land and think the only way to build an internet business is coding an ajax heavy service, getting viral growth, and being acquired.
This is not the way most internet businesses operate. Most depend on search engines to deliver prospective buyers to their site.
If you think SEO is easy, or completely self explanatory, you have clearly never tried to get a site ranked for a semi-competitive keyword. The vast amounts money associate with commercial search terms makes ranking highly competitive and the constant updates to Google's algorithm make it a constantly moving target.
Maybe all this anti-SEO sentiment stems from jealousy. Good SEO sites can make millions and have a much higher probability of success (compared to web apps) when orchestrated by an experienced SEO.
I think you're being harsh there. SEO is a byproduct of creating a good website/webapp.
Think about your users first, and they will link to you. You'll get inbound links. Make your site easy to use and navigate, and it'll be search engine friendly. It's far more useful to spend time making a good product, than trying to game the search engines.
SEO is mostly cleaning up after lazy developers or WYSWIG site builders who didn't write standards compliant, accessible, lean code and didn't know anything about information architecture. I know because I do it every day.
Search is how most people find most things online, period. Designing a website with such a contempt for SEO is a recipe for disaster. Yes, some websites don't need SEO or SEM, because they're naturally viral or sticky. Some products also don't need any marketing to catch on. In both cases, this is the exception and not the rule.
(SEO is also spending a large amount of your time defending your reputation against something that was left behind for you by snake-oil salesmen.)
SEO, just like anything by itself, is not an answer. Simple logical way to look at this:
1) You need more customers, visitors, users,etc.
2) Google often drives them to you. The higher you are, the more of them you see.
3) You apply SEO tactics to increase ranking
4) More people come, you've achieved your goals.
Now, doing this alone doesnt mean anything:
a) if your product sucks, you can be number one on google. odds are, you still wont go anywhere.
b) if your support sucks, the people you convery will leave.
c) if you cant sell, these people will leave after talking to you.
Hope this makes sense, just giving a balanced opinion.
SEO in its most puerile form of purely gaming the system is indeed BS.
But SEO is also about making your website as friendly as possible for search engines and improving your linking for users while also helping with the search engines. It's about developing your links from other sites and helping get your site placed in front of as many eyes as possible.
Sure a great product or service will rise to the top. But for those who aren't the best, SEO is a tool that they can utilize.
There are plenty of bad SEO firms out there who have no clue about what they are doing (and often do more harm than good to a site). Also SEO is seen as a fix-all solution - which it really isn't.
But SEO practices are an essential part of any website design, refresh or update.
At the end of the day it's just a buzzword that creates a market for selling their knowledge (knowt wrong with that of course!)
[+] [-] callmeed|17 years ago|reply
Yes, valid/well structured sites give you an SEO head-start, but there's more to it: - Properly structured browser titles matter - The way you write matters - Sitemaps matter - Optimizing Flash-based sites/pages is important because there are a lot of them - Links matter ... A LOT
There is a valid need for honest, skilled SEO professionals. The fact that there are so many bogus ones simply underscores this. Businesses on the web simply need to be educated on when and how to find a good one, when not to use one, and what they can DIY.
I'm sorry, but this post doesn't show much "intellectual honesty".
[+] [-] mrtron|17 years ago|reply
Titles? That is for the user. Sitemaps? Actually they don't matter as long as your content is linked to internally. They can be produced trivially anyways if you really feel the need, but Google finds all my pages. Optimizing flash pages? That sounds like frowned upon injection. You should not change the way you write for a search engine. Have anchor text that represents what you are linking to? Come on, thats how it should be regardless. The best thing you can have is backlinks - which good content/interesting sites should naturally develop.
I don't know of a single thing you should do to optimize your site for a search engine. edit: If you are downmodding me be because this is incorrect, speak up.
This article is clearly garbage though.
[+] [-] webwright|17 years ago|reply
SEO means lots of things to lots of people, and certainly big slices of it are crap.
Here are a few bits of SEO that I'd defy anyone to call bullshit:
1) Unique and descriptive title tags, so that results in Google are findable and make sense when they are found (title tags are used for the "blue link" part of the SERP).
2) Meta descriptions in the event that Google doesn't use bits of the content (not uncommon) to describe to the searcher what's on the other side of your link (this is the 155 or so characters of black text under the link)
3) Keyword research to understand how your customers look for you-- so you can use words that they search for when you have that choice to make. Is your ecommerce site selling "shoes" or "footwear"? "Steaks" or "meat"?
4) Backlinks. Sorry, but this is the currency of the web. If you aren't in the business of trying to be link-worthy and encouraging folks to link to you, you'll fall behind those who are.
5) Eschewing ajaxy guitar solos so that your content is consumable by search spiders.
[+] [-] liamQ|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dandelany|17 years ago|reply
A job is anything someone will pay you to do, and as long as there are companies that will pay employees to help them achieve better results on Google, SEO is and will remain a job.
From the [original] article: "Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime (sic)"
True. Anyone can also be a great cook and keep a house clean in their spare time, but that doesn't mean chefs and housekeepers don't have "real jobs."
I'll agree that there are a lot of overpaid SEO "consultants" who do nothing more than add META tags and ALT attributes and get paid $100+/hr to jerk off the rest of the time. However, speaking as an ex-employee of a company who has 3 results on Google's first page for "health insurance," there are legitimate companies out there who would drown if they didn't have SEO experts working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.
[+] [-] davidw|17 years ago|reply
If I did that kind of thing - actual work, I think I'd find a different thing to call myself to differentiate myself from the snake oil salesmen.
Still though, even that kind of thing strikes me as kind of "zero-sum"-ish... not really adding a lot of value to the world at large. Tournaments (search engine rankings in this case) are zero-sum, aren't they? Not that that's a reason it's "bullshit", but not high on my list of "people making the world a better place" either.
[+] [-] fallentimes|17 years ago|reply
Many of the SEO best practices can be implemented without taking away from the user experience. However, once the SEO crap starts taking away from the user experience...Stop.
[+] [-] omakase|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nanijoe|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] showerst|17 years ago|reply
I think a major fallacy of the crowd around here is to see SEO as primarily just code/content optimization. Good HTML, page structure, and tagging is a bit of an art, but business as usual to any top flight developer.
The elephant in the room with SEO is paid links. You may have a wonderful validating, user friendly page, but if your competition has 1000 backlink lead on you, you'll never see the top SERP spot for big keywords. Viral content can certainly help, but the unpredictable nature (esp of the links) tends to keep it in second place.
I think most programmers consider paid links 'beneath' them, and most marketers don't understand it (and technically it's grounds for a google ban, but that's only in blatant cases in my experience), but in reality:
1) Identifying proper backlink candidates, in your niche, and tracking contact info down
2) Crafting a non-spammy pitch, and following up on it
3) Making a deal, optimizing the link, and keeping it up to date
is not only a skill set to be mastered, it's a full time job for any site of large size.
Of course throwing down a technically sound site with good content is job #1 for any of us, but the idea that that alone will get you traffic, especially if your idea isn't novel/brilliant, is awfully optimistic. We all want to be Twitter, but somebody out there is getting rich selling wrenches, and the publicity/viral opportunities take real work to master.
Finally, many of the services good SEOs offer like advanced site analytics, integration with PPC campaigns, etc, can be major ROI gainers. They're not necessarily SEO, but they tend to fall under that community's expertise.
whew All that said, I too believe that 80% of the SEO experts out there are hawking snake oil, or black hat google-bomb of the month stuff that will have negative repercussions, but the idea that the whole industry is bunk comes from a large number of people that either all have a brilliant, novel idea, or are missing a serious ROI opportunity.
[+] [-] noodle|17 years ago|reply
too many SEO firms are selling turd polish.
[+] [-] mike_branski|17 years ago|reply
A lot of SEO can be done as you're building a site, but there are certain aspects to be made aware of. Unfortunately, too many companies sell these BS packages and belittle true SEO, instead of delivering actual results.
He'd also have more of a leg to stand on if he had given some _reasons_ to back his statements.
[+] [-] brm|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rationalbeaver|17 years ago|reply
We suggested that they might want to include the word 'pizza' somewhere on their homepage. That's right. The word pizza wasn't in the title, the meta-tags, the alt-tags, the body copy- it wasn't anywhere on the page. Apparently, that little tidbit had gotten lost among all the priorities of Branding, Marketing, Messaging, Promotions, etc., etc.
As soon as they added the word pizza into their title tag, they rocketed to the top of the results. Was that value worth paying for? Of course. Was the solution totally obvious? It should have been, but in case after case we find that, especially with larger/older companies, it's not.
IMO, SEO is completely natural at the one-man-sized-business level. Like most things, it gets increasingly complicated as you scale up.
[+] [-] bena|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdg|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwesley|17 years ago|reply
This is not the way most internet businesses operate. Most depend on search engines to deliver prospective buyers to their site.
If you think SEO is easy, or completely self explanatory, you have clearly never tried to get a site ranked for a semi-competitive keyword. The vast amounts money associate with commercial search terms makes ranking highly competitive and the constant updates to Google's algorithm make it a constantly moving target.
Maybe all this anti-SEO sentiment stems from jealousy. Good SEO sites can make millions and have a much higher probability of success (compared to web apps) when orchestrated by an experienced SEO.
[+] [-] axod|17 years ago|reply
Think about your users first, and they will link to you. You'll get inbound links. Make your site easy to use and navigate, and it'll be search engine friendly. It's far more useful to spend time making a good product, than trying to game the search engines.
[+] [-] wmeredith|17 years ago|reply
Search is how most people find most things online, period. Designing a website with such a contempt for SEO is a recipe for disaster. Yes, some websites don't need SEO or SEM, because they're naturally viral or sticky. Some products also don't need any marketing to catch on. In both cases, this is the exception and not the rule.
(SEO is also spending a large amount of your time defending your reputation against something that was left behind for you by snake-oil salesmen.)
[+] [-] jolly|17 years ago|reply
http://blog.ask2link.com/case-study-advertisers-get-great-re...
[+] [-] fallentimes|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlbaptiste|17 years ago|reply
SEO, just like anything by itself, is not an answer. Simple logical way to look at this:
1) You need more customers, visitors, users,etc. 2) Google often drives them to you. The higher you are, the more of them you see. 3) You apply SEO tactics to increase ranking 4) More people come, you've achieved your goals.
Now, doing this alone doesnt mean anything:
a) if your product sucks, you can be number one on google. odds are, you still wont go anywhere. b) if your support sucks, the people you convery will leave. c) if you cant sell, these people will leave after talking to you.
Hope this makes sense, just giving a balanced opinion.
[+] [-] trickjarrett|17 years ago|reply
But SEO is also about making your website as friendly as possible for search engines and improving your linking for users while also helping with the search engines. It's about developing your links from other sites and helping get your site placed in front of as many eyes as possible.
Sure a great product or service will rise to the top. But for those who aren't the best, SEO is a tool that they can utilize.
[+] [-] unalone|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErrantX|17 years ago|reply
Well thought out SEO as part of a larger scale site impact consideration is AWESOME :D
[+] [-] ErrantX|17 years ago|reply
There are plenty of bad SEO firms out there who have no clue about what they are doing (and often do more harm than good to a site). Also SEO is seen as a fix-all solution - which it really isn't.
But SEO practices are an essential part of any website design, refresh or update.
At the end of the day it's just a buzzword that creates a market for selling their knowledge (knowt wrong with that of course!)
[+] [-] jcapote|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kajecounterhack|17 years ago|reply
why?
[+] [-] lutorm|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmtame|17 years ago|reply
Look at this article and replace "SEO" with any other word that you disagree with.
For entertainment, just replace "SEO" with "McCain."