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.

But SEO has it place, many products are necessary, but also boring. – so they require SEO.