Sigh. As Danny Sullivan percipiently pointed out, we’re due for another round of slurs about SEO (it’s every two years or so). This time it’s Some Other Dickhead who equates SEO with spammers. Like a lot of disciplines (HR, Marketing, Advertising) people have a whole bunch of beliefs or a couple of negative experiences about ‘SEO’ which they apparently feel justified in broadcasting to the world at large. It’s as easy a game to play as saying “all politicians are crooks” or “or all coppers are bent” or “all nurses are sexy.” Truthfully, if you drew a Venn diagram with ’scam artists’ on the left and ‘SEOs’ on the right there’s a crossover. Same goes for any line of work. Quite why we’re hated enough to be the subject of such ire is beyond me.
Rather than go through his tedious, playing-to-the-peanut-gallery post point by point, I’ll just satisfy myself with the knowledge that thanks to the activities of “cockroaches” like myself, the businesses I work for get a positive ROI on every pound they spend with us. Whether it’s through improvements in site architecture, usability improvements, enhanced site performance and – yes – inbound links, all we do is work hand in glove with the likes of Google to give them what they say they want.
Do SEOs have to game the system sometimes? Yeah. For all their talk, Google is a software program that calculates relevancy. Not all the metrics they use are fair or transparent. You want to hobble your business by waiting for Google to reward you for not bothering about your site structure, or relying on some disinterested developer who wants to get out the door as quickly as possible and doesn’t know shit about what quality signals Google is looking for? See you in the dole queue, sucker.
The biggest joke of all is that his advice (“build something great”, “tell people about it”, “build a reputation”) is basically a description of what SEO in 2009 is actually about. Like many a simplistic analysis before, he makes the classical error of making the hard stuff sound easy.
#1 by Obnoxio The Clown at October 14th, 2009
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But all politicians ARE crooks.
#2 by Carps at October 14th, 2009
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A cogently argued point. I chose a right fucking example there, didn’t I?
#3 by David Whitehouse at October 15th, 2009
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To be fair the man has a point, if you make a website interesting, useful and worth talking about, no amount of SEO can compete.
But SEO has it place, many products are necessary, but also boring. – so they require SEO.
#4 by Carps at October 15th, 2009
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To be fair, the man has no point.
Google has an algorithm that millions of visitors use every day. A top listing in a competitive market means big bucks. Therefore people like us study how Google works and advise businesses how they can get to the top of those rankings. That’s what we call SEO.
Firstly, it’s naive to think that just because your website is “interesting” or “useful” that it will rank ahead of other people who are using SEO. Sure, if your business has 4 or 5 years to wait for it to grow naturally then knock yourself out. SEO exists whether he thinks it’s valid or not, so if you want to compete then just get over yourself and pay for an SEO to look things over for you.
Point of example, I’ve been writing this blog for a couple of years now. I use a nice Wordpress format, try to write interestingly and uniquely as often as I can, engage in the comments on other sites and everything else that is ‘best practice’ as described by Powazek. I’ve even written about stuff that no-one else picked up until weeks afterward.
But if this was my business I’d be dead in the water, because I get no traffic. Why not? Because I’ve never really looked after this site from an SEO perspective. It’s always had tonnes of dupe content issues, poor page titles and loads of other stuff you only understand if you’re an SEO. I’ve never sourced authority dofollow links on purpose. All that stuff is where proper, business-level SEO comes into play.
And, realistically, do you look at a competitive sphere and think “the site at #1 is the best” or do you think “the site at #1 has the best SEO”? I know which I think – and while ideally there’s a huge overlap between the two, both of us know that isn’t true.