Then you’re called a Web Developer. Good web development includes using proper formatting (like putting headlines in H tags) and understanding how the web works, search engines included. Valid code also has the side-effect of making your pages more accessible for your users, which is the point. Making your pages more accessible to robots is for robots.
I've been trying to put that idea into words for a while. I visit a lot of forums and freelance sites to prowl for good work, and I see many discussions about page rank, inbound links, three-way links, hosting pages on different IP's to get more PR juice for all of them, etc etc.
It just seems like it's a backwards way of going about things, like building a super highway to a place you hope there may be a city in the future.
Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers.
Just an aside...
Did you just quit smoking or something?
Yes.
I just quit cold turkey.. it sucks. Wish I'd never smoked in the first place.
"Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers."
That's a touch simplistic. Spread the word where? To whom? How?
The issue of getting customers is so complicated that we are all here, reading, learning and coming up with ideas to be a success.
What is "needed" to get customers varies by market, by demographic, by expected return, by quality of product etc etc.
To be a success, a site needs to serve a customer base and then MARKET TO THAT GROUP. SEO may be imperfect, but what SE have is every demographic, identifying themselves clearly, by the keywords they use. Missing out on that traffic is just crazy.
"Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers."
SEO is the catch all term for "spreading the word" on the internet (I do some SEO) - we don't limit it to search engine baiting (!) there is a lot more to it.
One can see things very simply - a bit of widget bait, an active forum, a good product, these can all create great inflows of PR and visitors. Then of course you've to optimise your landing pages, ...
SEO is built into the sites I design/write but there's always more one can do. Good inlinks go a long way.
If you build a store away from civilisation and just wait for customers - you may have an awesome enough product and enough capital to sit it out. But, sending a few flyers, issuing a press release, having promotions, a TV advert, some on-street ads, etc. are all going to help.
Ditto building a website - if you build it and your product is awesome I think it'll get out there eventually (probably as a copycat site by someone who pays for some SEO!?!) but using some PPC, gathering good inlinks, being part of an authority link community, getting blog coverage, getting diggs, etc. are all going to help.
Good web dev does include _some_ SEO. But SEO is too big a field for a web developer to do properly by themselves, a web dev team would have an SEO. Like expecting builders to have painter-decorators, if you want trompe-loeil rather than a slap of magnolia then you're going to need a dedicated expert.
This is the same BS that gets spewed about everything "If you have a great product, you don't need marketing", "If you're a great writer, you don't need an editor" etc etc
A web designer / developer is someone who builds web pages and/or sites. They can be good designers, bad, indifferent. They can know some SEO, none, or all of it. They can focus on server code, front end code or both, again to varying degrees.
But SEO != web designer is simple to prove: if I rank 10000000 for a term, the web designer still did his job :)
Whether this mythical "you" needs to hire an SEO expert or not depends on so many things.
And lastly this comment is just bizarre:
"Social media is rapidly becoming much more important than Google."
Seriously? Really? The $$ made from a Social Media click > an SEO click? Seriously dude, you need to get you some Google analytics and an ecommerce site.
Social Media is to SEO what a park is to a mall. People may prefer parks, they may prefer having fun, but when they want to buy, they go to the mall, and most smart businesses would surely rather be situated in the mall.
The point is that there are only two ways to "optimize" your site: 1) hire a better designer and 2) game the ranking algorithms. The latter is what SEO "experts" do. From the search engine's perspective, they want their ranking to accurately match which site is most useful and relevant to their user. The ideal search engine, once things like location are discounted (a brilliantly designed site offering a useful service too far away from me is a bad search result) is going to rank on how good the site actually is.
So is, say, a better onsite link structure, an optimised description on each page, SERP indented listing, ... (1) or (2).
I suppose you wouldn't hire a UI expert for a GUI program either?
a brilliantly designed site offering a useful service too far away from me is a bad search result
How far is too far? Depends what you're buying right? That's a complex algo. How about if you happen to be travelling there anyway? How does the SE know? What if it's the only place in your country that sells it, would you go further now?
I'm confused. Nowhere in the article did I see a recommendation against doing any marketing at all; instead I saw a quite sensible debunking of a bunch of snake oil that's known either not to work or to actively hurt your site's visibility in search engines.
Effective marketing is a good thing. Wasting money on crap? Not so much.
I recall some time ago that the concept of SEM/SEO-based marketing had actually become somewhat unnecessary - the major search engines (ie: Google) were working to deliberately curtail the demand for such services in the first place.
Say, by developing tech that actually gives you what you were searching for, and not what you were lead into reading via various search "hacks."
I dunno. Seems cheaper, to me, to get a decent web dev at market rates than a verbose "SEO expert" at inflated worth.
And how do Google curtail demand? By adding complexity to the algos that compile the SERPs ... and what do we need SEOs for? To decompile the complexity in the algos used by the SEs. Google add brand weightings, my ranks go down and sales are through the floor, do I say "oh well I'm not a brand I'll just quit" or "how do I show Google I'm still worth ranking"?
When I go to a restaurant I like to have the barman to make my drinks and the to chef cook for me. The barman is cheaper(!) but he tends to cook worse than the chef and his repertoire sucks.
Except that, if we take your restaurant staff analogy seriously, you're actually bribing the bartender to get the chef to put your product on the menu.
Depending on the product or service your offering, the traditional (if time-consuming) direct outreach to the intended audience may still be better than hiring the services of an SEO "expert."
I'm not really in favor of SEO in that it seems to be a zero-sum proposition (if ten companies hire ten SEO "experts" to get the number one position... nine of them aren't going to get what they wanted). Also, it's not about building new stuff, creating new wealth, but more about (in the non-evil cases) repackaging something that already exists. That's not really my cup of tea.
That depends entirely on what you're doing. If you're competing for #1 on [credit cards], yep, its a zero-sum game and most people will lose. SEO is about so much more than just winning on one term, though. (Do we say marketing is a zero-sum game because There Can Be Only One, e.g., pizza shop for any given delivery?)
Concrete examples:
1) Over 25% of searches are globally unique, and the results for these are often suboptimal. (Google has a very good handle on what [credit cards] there are, but does not necessarily know a [good class activity for Halloween].) Proper SEO for your site to target those things is mostly just about getting links and writing your onpage content better, and creates value for the searcher.
2) Content creation is a core SEO strategy and is a source of new wealth.
This was the #1 page for [biology bingo] three years ago:
There are 43 activities there created by a teacher to mesh well with common lesson plans (people really like the Parts of A Cell one for whatever reason), and an option to tweak any of them to exactly what you need for your lesson. Those 43 activities have helped teach well in excess of 80,000 students. And they all exist because I saw SEO value in creating new stuff.
> 2) Content creation is a core SEO strategy and is a source of new wealth.
Could be, but are "SEO experts" actually doing the content creation?
You should not be paying someone more than 5$ an hour to tell you to "create good stuff". Like the article says, most of this isn't hard to figure out. Did you have to hire an SEO expert to get your biology page built?
Also, marketing is about much more than just 'selling stuff'. It's about identifying potential customers, understanding their needs, and shaping the direction of development to meet those needs.
I did not hire an SEO expert for the same reason I did not hire a programmer.
(More broadly I think that most people should not hire "SEO experts" because any one you are able to afford is less competent than you need, but that is another discussion altogether.)
There are many people around these parts who think SEO is useless, dirty, dirty-and-useless, or totally obvious. Those people could benefit enormously from broadening their perspectives a little bit.
For example: I have over 700 bingo activities. I suppose they could have been posted chronologically, like a blog, or alphabetically, like a directory. They aren't -- they're "siloed" into categories, with each category being thematically coherent, and category pages linking to related activities and activities linking to related categories. That is sort of the tip of the information architecture iceberg for my site. It has clear usability and SEO benefits. (If you're looking at Parts of a Cell bingo right now, you're rather more likely to be interested in other Biology bingo activities than Japanese culture bingo.) You might think this is obvious, and indeed, it is that special kind of obvious that no one in my niche bothers to do.
There is also an algorithm for promotion of popular content. (If you took a quick gander around my site right now, you'd notice nearly every page links to a Halloween bingo activity. That is not an accident.) Does "build good stuff" imply to you "You should probably make the link graph on your website dynamically change in response to market conditions and analytics data, because that will maximize conversions and also deliver great SEO benefits"? No, thats just solid SEO -- a bit of marketing, a bit of usability, a bit of tech, and a bit understanding how to play an important game whose umpire makes unquestionable calls according to a rulebook only they can read.
Everything you are pointing out as "SEO" seems to either not really be the same thing the "SEO experts" are selling or actually is nearly "totally obvious" to anyone in the web business. I think the only thing I've ever really seen that struck me as "real work that is non obvious" connected with SEO was A/B testing.
Once again, trotting out Halloween specials in October is not something you need to hire an SEO expert for.
> unquestionable calls according to a rulebook only they can read.
That's something else that bugs me about the whole "SEO expert" business. They're on the same playing field as you are, and since Google changes and adapts as well, "years of experience" don't really count for a lot.
No one is questioning the value of paying some attention to this stuff - you ignore it at your own peril if you operate on the web. What people find dubious are the "SEO experts" who sell that and only that. If someone's a good web developer, they're going to be able to tell you the same stuff anyway, and probably add more value elsewhere to boot. And all of this commentary is ignoring the genuinely shady operators who have also taken to using the "SEO" moniker, who further muddy the waters.
Once again, trotting out Halloween specials in October is not something you need to hire an SEO expert for.
If you're trotting them out in October you're about five years too late if you're aiming at the top spot on Google. You need those pages to gather authority; part of that is from longevity, partly from past inlinks you've gathered, your linkbait for halloween last year ..... Reuse a page created for "Halloween 2009" from several years ago - which pages looks most authoritative, the one created in Oct 2009 about the subject along with 2 Million others or the one that is 5 years old and has established inlinks perhaps from .edu sites, perhaps one hop from pages with millions of "halloween" inlinks. Oh but your competitor has "halloween2009.com", oh well.
A/B testing is easier than knowing what to test especially if you need to keep ahead of competitors and ontrack with the changes to the search, discovery and marketing environment online.
I don't find the answers to questions like "how much should I spend on getting a higher listing, I'm top 10 now, what's the ROI", "how can I get my competitors indented SERPs links removed", "how can I get a second top 10 listing", "does PR scuplting work", "should I tweet to improve my blog's visibility, what sales return will I expect", "how can I optimise my landing page", "will a shallower link structure increase CTR, revenue?", "will that outlink hurt me? help?", "what's the most important ranking factor?" etc. that obvious.
I must be a klutz.
Oh and do you think years of experience as a tailor will help one make good suits? Every customer is a different size ...
If one were selling halloween crap to simply try and exploit a calendar date I don't think one need be too high and mighty about optimising ones search position.
There is more than one company selling stuff for halloween. The top spot on Google gets 85% of the entire SE traffic (say). Remind me why one guy selling crappy plastic tridents, witch masks and pumpkin shaped buckets deserves to get all that traffic and the other guys don't?
Content creation is a core SEO strategy and is a source of new wealth.
And the author of the post misses that completely. He seems to think that web designers and web developers can ensure a proper SE ranking, which is ridiculous. Given the above, the best SEO specialist is someone that can rewrite/expand your content. Make sure the right keywords are dropped in the text, that the content is reachable for the SE and that there is plenty of content available.
If ten companies bid for the no. 1 position in sponsored search or advertising of most kind, nine will be disappointed. If ten washing powder companies advertise, they are probably not going to sell much more powder between them, they are just fighting to divide the pie. Similar could be said about much if not most economic activity. Along the way, value gets created.
I think people are splitting hairs between SEO and SEM. SEO is what good web developers should have done. It's proper formatting, crawler accessibility, et cetera.
SEM, on the other hand, is link-building, keyword targeting, PPC campaigns, quality content, et cetera. Basically, anything designed to manipulate behavior towards visiting your site.
SEO is perfectly understandable as a legitimate business provided it is services defined as above. It's just about making sure that the technical aspects of your site are in order. Still, I believe that this segment is shrinking, as search engines are getting better at understanding the sites and developers are getting better at optimizing their sites in the first place.
SEM is where the debate should be taking place. For lack of a better definition, SEM is about 'tricking' people into visiting your site, or otherwise 'gaming' the system. Those words might not be the best, but I hope their point is taken. (Note: 'Trick' could be read 'manipulate' or 'encourage'.) Quality content 'tricks' people into visiting your site. Link-bait titles 'trick' people into clicking. Back-links 'trick' Google into ranking you higher, which in turn 'tricks' others into clicking on your results more.
Point of order: I am not a professional web developer, and I don't sell or know personally anyone who sells any sort of SEO/SEM services.
I'm not sure what your point is. 'Trick' could be read as manipulation. An ad campaign could be considered a form of manipulation. The advertiser is manipulating the behavior of the viewer by convincing them to take action. It's driving users to your site because of something off-site.
With my post above I really just wanted to say that the broad term 'SEO' would be better divided based on the type of work done. SE Optimization is on-site. SE Marketing is off-site. I think the current definitions are too broad.
SEO is what good web developers should have done. It's proper formatting, crawler accessibility, et cetera.
Why should the web dev have worked to get you a diverse range of keyword rich inlinks from authority sites? Oh that's right they shouldn't that's nothing to do with web dev. What is the top ranking factor (according to the SEOMoz crowd anyway)? "Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links"
That's why I defined it as optimization. SEO in my opinion is NOT (or rather, should not be) getting links. That's SEM. Optimization is the technical aspect of things (headers, etc.). Marketing involves getting others to link to you. That's the manipulation, or 'tricking' that I talked about.
I agree that inbound links (and many other off-page factors) contribute significantly to SERP rankings. I would just rank them under the SEM tasks.
You’re just looking for work/promotion/love.
Please, God, no. I’ve got two clients that keep me busy full time right now, and I work on Fray when I should be sleeping. I have no reason to promote this site. I make no money from it. And I’m married, thanks.
I like that bit, especially with the links to "fray" a couple, diverse anchors and then the big landing page button "buy or subscribe" on the Fray.com page. I don't believe he's naive enough to think this is not gaining him rankings for Fray.
From what I can see he's saying we don't need SEOs, we need webdesigners to do SEO and SEOs should do webdesign. I guess he likes one person to do everything for him rather than have experts do what they are expert at.
SEO is self selective, want to be top of Google? Google for "SEO", the top guy knows how to get the top position better than anyone else! For me in the UK that guy is below Wikipedia (surprise!) but has Wikipedia style site-spotlight links and so he's up to date too ... wonder what black hat stuff he's doing ...
You could make that same comment about his commercial links to anything he says. Derek is pretty famous. I don't think he needs to stir up controversy to get attention. But even if he wasn't, this comment is almost content-free.
As an SEO "expert" I take exception to this post, Yes there are a lot of bad companies out there selling snake oil, just like there are in most (all?) industries. That does not mean that all SEO companies are evil and it certainly doesn't mean that all SEO techniques don't work. Lots of people spout the "content is king" mantra, and while i'd agree content is the most important part of a website, you could have the best content in the world, but without SEO, how are people going to find your content and link to it? Unlike the author, most people can't afford to wait 10 years for their site to become popular. The fact is, to get to the top of the results pages you generally need a lot of links, and link building is HARD. This is why every major company has an in house SEO team or hires an agency - because SEO is one of the most effective ways to increase your ROI.
I'll give you one thing, at least you're up front about it.
Here's my take on the whole thing:
The www was getting along fine without all the bottom feeders and people 'gaming the system'. Now it's an arms race, and like in any good arms race the people that make the money are the ones selling to both sides.
Poor unsuspecting bystanders in the middle, who still believe that 'content is king' don't stand a chance amidst all that violence.
If all the so called-seos would lose their net access for the next two decades or so I think the quality of the net - and of search engine results - would go up dramatically.
The only reason that google was able to get their foot in the door in the first place was because altavista was too easy to game. Now it's an expert matter, so lots of money is to be made because traffic is 'king'.
Fortunately for me search engines are only a very small %age of my traffic. And no, that does not mean I could be doing a whole lot better if I hired you.
Jacquesm , I suspect you're being inflammatory here.
Part of the SEO on one site I worked on was to optimise to ensure it was better geo-targetted, ie decrease the visitor count from jurisdictions where that site is not valid. Why? Bandwidth but the a result is cleaner SERPs elsewhere. I guess I'm just pure evil?
I do things like name URLs for the content they contain, not /item?id=887743 but /why-not-to-hire-an-SEO - letting people know the content of a link before they click it; evil I guess?
Then there's optimising for speed to improve user retention, gzip enabling, trimming needless scripts and CSS, ... (WW looks like it could be leaner). I consider this part of "SEO".
"Fortunately for me search engines are only a very small %age of my traffic. And no, that does not mean I could be doing a whole lot better if I hired you"
No, but increasing your number of search engine visitors would increase your revenue would it not?
One of the main tenets of SEO is that everybody will profit from traffic from search engines.
Very few people actually take the time to see if that statement holds true for their site.
The major keywords that my site is found on indicate that the users that come through that route are freeloaders, eating up bandwidth and never ever signing up for the premium package.
I can't blame them, I wouldn't either but that's a different story.
Targeting different keywords would be possible but it would require unethical behaviour wrt to building links and I don't go for that. My competitors do, I wish them best of luck.
The users that support the site are not in the hit-and-run category, they've found the site because their buddies are on it, and they stick together.
So, that's why more search engine traffic wouldn't help much, if at all. After all, if (increase-in-sales - (cost-of-acquisition + cost of freeloaders)) leaves you with a net loss then there isn't much point.
And if it would, then I probably would still find using SEO an unethical thing to do.
Maybe that's strange and maybe I should be going all-out to squeeze every last penny out of the internet but I prefer to get my users through references.
He walked into that one, but the fact is, there are many sites that DO get most of their traffic from search engines, and they make a lot of money off of it.
(Spoken as a former SEO who could prove his clients' ROI was well in excess of his substantial consulting fees.)
So, if that were the general case then ALL seos should be able to prove to their clients that their ROI exceeds the consulting fees, in which case they can all work on a no-cure-no-pay basis.
The problem is proving that any change in sales is due to SEO activity and nothing else - "you say our 100% up turn is due to your optimisations but my wife reckons it's my new toupe, now those cable ads are drawing them in droves to the website ...".
If your sector fell by 10% but you only fell 5% did they do a good job?
Without meaning to cause offense, if you get paying customers via referals but not via search engines then i'd argue that theres probably issues with your sales copy. It's your job to convince search engine visitors that your service is worth paying for.
I would suspect that a fair number of users have registered to make a post, so I'm not entirely certain what you're getting at. (Unless it's just curiosity, in which case I'll allow YorkSEO to speak for themselves).
Ok, what about new companies entering a competitive niche? You can have a perfectly optimised website but still not get any traction in the search engines. These days a good cms will do your on page optimisation for you, but links are what you need to make your site visible. Yes you could build links yourself, but it probably isn't the most efficient use of your time as your success rate will usually be lower than that of an experienced seo.
And yes I'm a long time lurker who registered just to post this
Maybe I've misunderstood something about "SEO" as a position (thinking it was all about page optimization/design), but are you saying that its about building incoming links to a site as well?
Do companies hire you just to help build the number of links to their sites from other sites? How do you do this? Isn't that just plain old "marketing" at that point?
Yes plenty of companies request linkbuilding only, I'm not going to go into all the details of how we do it, but often its a case of contacting webmasters and asking them to link. Although there are certain techniques we use to increase our success rate which is where marketing aspects come in. In fact most good seo companies are really just online marketers, with seo being an umbrella term for a wide variety of techniques
Then in this case I think the discussion has become one where we use the same term to refer to different things: I've always thought of SEO as "use meta tags, use headlines, use short URLs, etc" - pure optimization of existing contact to help engines better parse your contact.
I'd label what you are referring to as more of online marketing to build a site/brand's presence and reputation, which is something that then influences a search engine ranking.
I could find out for free how to do a lot of things. Make my own whisky, fix my car. However I'm not a distiller or a mechanic so I leave those tasks to people who know what to do without having to read a manual every time. Someone who also knows what not to waste time on(meta tags for example which for some reason still seem to feature high in all entry level seo step lists).
No, it's Google's job to help people find things. That's what it does. SEO exists to game Google into placing your site higher in results. I make something, like some small open-source software, put it on GitHub, and it shows up as the first result on Google within hours if you are searching specifically for something like it. I didn't have to hire a SEO.
And it is SEOs job to help Google find things. I'm not going to deny blackhat SEO exists like I wouldn't deny blackhat developers exist but you can't tarnish the whole profession because of your ignorance of the actual role of a whitehat SEO professional.
It shows up in hours on github because github has a lot of authority. It shows up high on google because I'm guessing you're searching for pretty long keyword strings. So if your ok with people finding your code when they search for "ruby gem for mysql connections" thats cool you don't need to hire an SEO professional. Hell you never need to hire an SEO professional. But if you want someone who knows more about it to help you with making sure Google and yahoo and bing can find your information then you can.
I really don't get the hatred on this site for SEO in general. I'm not an SEO professional myself but I know quite a few and now a days most people in the profession that are active and well known are all above board. They help you structure your information to make it easier to find and help you build relationships with other sources of traffic. Hardly evil stuff.
In the same way that marketing exists to game people into buying things? A one word argument, "game", lacks substance.
The goal of SEO, good SEO, is to build a site that caters to both users AND SEs. After all, users make you money, and ignoring one over the other is silly.
A classic example is AJAX. SEs can't pass it, and neither cana lot of users. A "good" designer may know this and buid a site to cater for these users, but how? Will it use forms (invisible to SEs) or an alternate structure?
Sure, a great web designer may "get" all this, but can you be sure? Given that SEs provide the largest, ongoing form of traffic online, why take the risk?
"I make something, like some small open-source software, put it on GitHub, and it shows up as the first result on Google within hours if you are searching specifically for something like it. I didn't have to hire a SEO."
Fallacy of dosage: ranking for a service with little competition is pretty easy. Capturing the whole raft of traffic available on a topic: difficult!!
I don't see how. My last point was that a lot of the information on this stuff is not helpful. Just like a expert mechanic can listen to an engine and hear problems without having to check every part an expert at SEO can decide which changes are most important without having to go through every checklist and step out there.
By following common sense, good design, and doing some research and reading about Google's suggestions to web developers.
Put down the coolaid.
Seriously -- Google is a business. They make money by selling the results of an algorithm. There's nothing magic or sacred about Google's algorithm. It makes mistakes. They blackball people. Even more critical, links are not a necessary and sufficient reason for an article to be the best thing I want to see. It's just a guessing game that works most of the time for most people.
If I had a cure for cancer that worked, and I put it on a website with a new domain tomorrow, and never SEO'd it, who do you think would come by?
Bupkis. Zero. Zilch. Nobody.
Good SEO is marketing. Marketing is a good thing. We need people to do things to bring to our attention stuff we might like. Google is not about to take the place of all marketing -- maybe that was a dream years ago but it's turned out to just be a fantasy on Google's part.
If you found a cure for cancer and only put it on a website, maybe noone would find it.
But if you also mentioned it to a few people (especially a doctor or cancer victim) then it would be featured in news articles, broadcast, tweeted etc. because it's a big deal. Soon your website would appear first in any relevant search.
That's the thing -- sure, perhaps all good ideas get great publicity and links simply because they're good ideas.
And perhaps all good business ideas make their owners lots of money simply because they're good ideas.
And perhaps all articles get referenced and linked based on their degree of usefulness to the world.
But in the real world, somebody has to go out and peddle ideas. That's marketing, sales, networking -- whatever you want to call it. Nowadays google is forcing us to go comment on other people's blogs, link-trade, and lord knows what else.
Good ideas simply don't always become popular simply because they're good and you tell a few people. It takes a lot more work than that.
The argument that web designers, web developers etc. should understand everything related to their work is fine at a small scale eg. creating a personal blog/small website. But it's a stretch to say that nobody should focus on just one area.
To be an expert at something normally requires that you specialize in that area. For a start-up you need to be a jack-of-all-trades but as a company grows it makes sense to have staff that specialize in different areas.
My background is in pay-per-click marketing and a lot of companies do very well managing their own Adwords campaigns. But for large companies or small companies that don't want to deal with learning a new skill, the cost of hiring/outsourcing to someone who specializes in that is justified by the time saved and the improved ROI.
This applies to SEO as well but also to any area where the work involved has a significant impact on the business.
Except that you're a drop-in replacement for an existing middleman -- the broadcast/print media ad-agency. Companies weren't really doing the low-level management of their ad campaigns before.
SEO is a bit more of a novelty, especially since the 'SEO professionals' aren't middlemen between you and Google.
Point taken. Perhaps a more appropriate analogy is the PR industry. I know the PR industry gets almost as much criticism as SEO. But the argument that we shouldn't use specialists in whatever field because we could do it ourselves is very damaging.
Here's another example. If I run a coffee shop and 50% of my customers are walk-ins from the street, it makes sense for me to hire a sign-writer to attract more people. Even though my coffee might be the same as always I get more customers because people can find my shop. I could paint the sign myself but hiring an expert to do it will likely pay for itself.
If I run a website and 50% of my customers come from search engines then it makes sense to invest an appropriate amount in making sure those customers can find me. If I have a small site, that investment might be of my time or I could outsource it.
So the important thing is that we need to invest in what brings new customers. If you think that an SEO professional doesn't deliver enough value that's a perfectly valid decision but I think it's a big mistake to extend this to not investing in SEO itself.
Bullshit. I have an astrology site (moon calendar) that is now not even among the first 10 pages of Google search results for the main keyword. Believe me when I say that most of the results that show up before my site are decidedly not better than my moon calendar. SEO has nothing to do with it?
I did all the web development things properly (certainly all the headings and what not - I even have RSS feeds and a Twitter bot, and of course sitemap and so on). It didn't help.
I looked for 10seconds tops at the two pages .. first thing, they "mondkalendar" have keywords in title first, you have your domain, switch that around. Yes it matters. Yes I'm sure there are more "obvious" things too.
Hm, didn't find much else that I had missed, but thanks.
I must admit to one mistake, though: at one time I entered the site in some web catalogs. I guess I'll try to get it out there again, which might become difficult.
Interesting tidbit on the flickr page he links to: "Google can customize your search results based on location, recent search activity and/or other, logged out or not.... Adding &pws=0 to your query turns of personalization."
You pay a guy to build your deck. He does a shitty job. That's the web developer you shouldn't have hired in the first place. You then pay someone else to come and paint it. That's the SEO guy you're now paying to band-aid your busted crap and make you feel like it's all okay.
If you're bringing in SEO as a band-aid until you can hire an honest to god full time developer/designer or build up a real web department, or whatever, that's probably okay as long as you're admitting that.
If you're bringing in an SEO guy to do nothing but turd-polish, and you're calling it "optimization," something's wrong, and from experience and conversations I've had about SEO with friends, unwilling-to-admit-that-we're-polishing-a-turd seems to be an extremely popular reason to bring in SEO guys.
An seo is not a mechanic that fixes your car, an seo is a person that will lead lots of people to your store (so they say) because everybody else is also hiring hustlers (so they say).
They don't fix anything that was broken before they arrived on the scene, but once one person starts misbehaving in this way everybody else that's purely in it for the money will have to follow suit.
I do SEO consulting in addition to web design and development consulting. And most of what I do in this area is exactly that: fixing what's broken.
Almost all sites we encounter have one or more of the following problems:
- Content that is unreachable by crawlers
- Improperly used HTML tags, or lack of semantic tags in general
- Poorly designed, or non-existant, information architecture
- Lack of meta descriptions, alternate text, etc
And almost all sites we review could benefit from:
- Keyword research and targeting
- Load time optimization
- Internal linking optimization
- Content creation
- Link building
How exactly you equate that with hustling is beyond me.
It's hustling because you can only have 10 sites in the first 10 spots for any keyword or combination.
By selling services to party 'A' you can temporarily upset the balance, which then immediately gives you a new customer in parties B through to infinity because they all would like to be in that 'top' spot.
So, the 'scarcity' of the positions on the first few pages for any given set of keywords are what drives that whole market with all of these clueless companies shelling out tons of money for something that only benefits the SEO and the temporary holders of those 10 slots.
I'ts like with lawyers, stoke the fight, everybody loses but the lawyers win.
It's a classical example of an arms race.
btw, the funniest thing you can do when an SEO approaches you is ask them if they have a website, then type 'SEO services' in to google and see if they come up in the first 10 results, if not (and that's a 99% chance) enjoy hearing them squirming to explain why not.
You could say that about any form of marketing. There are only so many cola drinkers to sell to, and if I market Coke it will be at the expense of Pepsi. Marketing is always an arms race (so is business in general).
To take your lawyer analogy further consider this: you could say hiring a lawyer is gaming the system (i.e., being found innocent when you are in fact guilty). Or you could say that hiring a lawyer is ensuring that your case is presented as well as possible, allowing it to succeed or fail on its own merit.
Similarly, you probably view SEO as gaming the system, whereas I view it as ensuring that your content is presented in the best way possible.
Either way, your issue is with the Google/the court, not with the SEOs/lawyers or their clients/defendants.
btw, the funniest thing you can do when an SEO approaches you is ask them if they have a website, then type 'SEO services' in to google and see if they come up in the first 10 results, if not (and that's a 99% chance) enjoy hearing them squirming to explain why not.
Sure, and if a company calls to sell you marketing services and you've never heard of them, you should ask why. And if a company wants to make you a website and their's looks shitty, you probably don't want to hire them either.
While I'm fairly sympathetic to your overall perspective, your last point is simply not persuasive at all. As a former SEO, I'd have had no problem comfortably answering that question, and any squirming would be entirely in your own smug imagination.
First, 'SEO services' isn't self-evidently the most important keyword phrase in the industry. Why pick that one? That's just a gotcha.
Second, SEO is extremely competitive. The agencies on the first page for high profile SEO-related keyword phrases charge at least several hundreds of dollars per hour in consulting fees. Most businesses can't afford that.
Third, incumbency is a huge advantage for placement in competitive SERPs, both by itself and because it implies the accumulation of important ranking factors you can't just gin up at a moment's notice. (Don't read too much into that though. There are plenty of opportunities for less competitive phrases and a long campaign can build up to more competitive terms.)
Because it is the set of keywords that any SEO would like to be found under.
> Second, SEO is extremely competitive.
ANY business is extremely competitive, not just SEO, why do you think SEO is some kind of magical special case ?
> Third, incumbency is a huge advantage for placement in competitive SERPs, both by itself and because it implies the accumulation of important ranking factors you can't just gin up at a moment's notice.
That we agree on for the most part. I've seen relative newcomers do some amazing stuff, without SEO simply by getting their users energized. There isn't any SEO strategy that will work as well for you as a couple of hundred thousand uses creating buzz for you.
> There are plenty of opportunities for less competitive phrases
That's the low hanging fruit though.
> a long campaign can build up to more competitive terms.
And that is where we agree again, but most SEOs are people making very large promises that they find hard to fulfill. The whole industry has an extremely bad reputation because of this, and it's not just a 'few bad apples' either.
I'm sure there are 'good' SEOs, just like there are 'good' lawyers, but for the most part I wouldn't want to be associated with any of that stuff.
Search engines are for the most part doing everything they can to look at the web through an SEO neutral lens.
Fixing stuff that is obviously broken is fine with me, but don't get me started on 'link building'.
Gaming the system is where I draw the line and there isn't an SEO out there that wouldn't game the system given half a chance.
i did audience acquisition at a large established media company and in the span of about a year helped increase their traffic from natural(as opposed to paid) search over 90%.
now i'm a web analyst at a large retail site and at least 1/8 of orders is directly attributed to natural search traffic on a last touch and many more on a less direct attribution window.
if you don't think natural search is a marketing channel that needs attention, great- it'll leave more opportunity for the the rest of us.
Then you’re called a Web Developer. Good web development includes using proper formatting (like putting headlines in H tags) and understanding how the web works, search engines included. Valid code also has the side-effect of making your pages more accessible for your users, which is the point. Making your pages more accessible to robots is for robots.
I've been trying to put that idea into words for a while. I visit a lot of forums and freelance sites to prowl for good work, and I see many discussions about page rank, inbound links, three-way links, hosting pages on different IP's to get more PR juice for all of them, etc etc.
It just seems like it's a backwards way of going about things, like building a super highway to a place you hope there may be a city in the future.
Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers.
Just an aside...
Did you just quit smoking or something?
Yes.
I just quit cold turkey.. it sucks. Wish I'd never smoked in the first place.