I’ve just finished re-reading a fairly old piece called “SEO Is Bullshit“. It’s still stupid. Why?
It suffers from a failure to define terms. “SEO” as in “I will add your site to a 1000 spam filled pages for only $1.48 per link” is pretty lame. It isn’t even what I’d call SEO – it’s spammy link building. But even spammy link building, in large volumes, builds rank.
Do we tell our clients to do that? No. I haven’t bought a spammy link for us or for a client – though as I say, they can be effective. Not much, but they can be effective in rank changing.
So what is SEO?
Some of the comments in response to the blog articulate it better than the article.
SEO is a component of web design.
However, I don’t claim to do graphics, the component that most think of for web design. Look at this blog – does that *look* like I have a frecking clue about designing for visual aesthetic? When I want graphics, I hire in a designer (which reminds me I was intending to hire in someone we work with to fix this up). When I want programming, I hire in a programmer. SEO is a speciality, like coding, DB administration for a high volume site, etc.
In my mind, SEO is a discipline that helps to create web sites that rank well because users want to find them. They have unique, useful, compelling content that solves a user problem; they interconnect with other useful sites – passing rank to those sites. They are designed so that search engines will find the content easily and deliver useful titles and descriptions so that users can choose the site on the search engine results page, not after wasting time visiting a site that might or might not turn out to be useful. It is a part of marketing, too, as you have to understand the intent behind a search query and help people to either find and buy a product or get to a better resource – because hub sites are useful for SEO as well as for users.
However, having a great business idea doesn’t mean that you know how to do what I define as SEO, nor does it mean that you magically code in Java or PHP or Ruby or whatever, or protect your site from security vulnerabilities, or understand how to design a scalable system or to run a DB backup, or even understand segmentation, the buying process and a conversion path. I don’t even expect the internet marketing director of such a startup to understand any more than that he needs SEO – just as he wouldn’t write an email package or a web analytics package from scratch. You go out and buy the talent or the package.
Linkbait is Linkbait
So yeah. He wrote linkbait. A bunch of people have subscribed to it and endorsed it, but they haven’t, mostly, articulated what they object to.
“SEO” as spammy link building is BS. It works. But it is BS – it doesn’t get sites that *users* want to see, high in search results. It is profitable. BS *can* be profitable. I don’t do it, because there’s other ways, useful to users, to achieve the same or better effect.
“SEO” as in article scraping (RSS or just cut and paste) and Inanity Generators is BS. But it works. Or you wouldn’t see so many inane and pointless sites high in rankings. Bluntly – I don’t take these on as clients. If your content is pointless nonsense, I’m not interested.
SEO Is Hard Work
A SEO has to find keywords that people who might be interested in the product, might use. Assign them to a phase of the buying process, and design content that appeal to that phase, and to the *other* meanings that the search might have. Design a path through the site – working with the web site owner. Make sure that internal links reflect what is happening at the other end of the link – rather than “click here”. Dissuade the graphical designer from going to an entirely Flash site, or using framed sites, or using active JS and movies for all content. Monitor the performance in SERPs, the webmaster consoles, web server logfiles for 404’s (user links and search engine). Work with the webmaster on 301’s and 302’s for expired content – which is the right one to use, and where does it point? It means rapidly understanding someone else’s business model, and the purposes that a potential visitor might fulfill – and switching between those mental setups several times a day.
Self-redundancy
I usually aim to work myself out of a permanent job – because SEO principles can be learned by content developers amd website programmers and graphics guys. But in practice I rarely do end up jobless – because there’s always a new wrinkle and a new way to optimise and new services that need tweaking. Like sitemaps and changes to the robot exclusion protocol, or people switching web hosts. There’s always a need to call on someone who knows how to handle it.
I have, as clients, people to whom I taught the basics of SEO. They consult me, because I’ve been doing it longer and have dealt with more varied, wierd and special cases than they have. So SEO is not a “unique gift” or too difficult to learn. It certainly isn’t as difficult to learn as, oh, lawyering. But it does require an understanding of marketing and technology in a way that baffles both specialist marketeers and specialist technologists. Just as I’ll probably never learn how to design, develop, deliver and measure a good TV advert.
SEO Is Multidisciplinary
SEO is not bullshit. SEO is a complex multidisciplinary function that modern web sites need, as much or more than they need security penetration experts and scalability experts. And it is expertise that isn’t (usually) needed permanently on staff, or needs to be an intrinsic knowledge base of the programme manager or business owner. The businesses’ business has to be top front and centre of their focus. SEO is like accounting, or lawyering – something that can be outsourced to a competent specialist and mustn’t get in the way of the primary business – but without which the business won’t be as successful.
There’s some really good SEO blogs out there, describing all the types of information that have to be used. I’m a particular fan of Bill Slawski’s blog – “SEO by the Sea“. This is not the blog of someone who uses lightweight techniques, but a serious, insight laden consideration of a multidisciplinary exercise.
Updates
209-03-01 : Apologies – some kind of unexpected interaction between WordPress and FeedBurner resulted in this ancient article being sent again to email subscribers.
Des wrote,
Interesting thoughts.
My background in almost entirely in usability.
In a typical large project, we identify the target users and build a site for them.
This means, using the words they use. This means writing content they are interested in. This means make the site behave the way they expect it to. This means designing a simple user flow through the store/app/site/whatever.
We hand our work over to programmers. They build it using XHTML 1.1 strict compliance. We only use Flash where absolutely necessary, as it’s nearly always a requirement that our sites are AA compliant. Accessibility is something we take very seriously.
When the system administrators go to launch the site, we instruct them (though they know already) to re-target all the URLs correctly.
All of these things we did before SEO was an internet craze. The reason SEO is associated with buying spammy links, is because it is one activities that has come along because of it.
Every example you mentioned, falls into a different discipline in my opinion, whether it’s usability, design, programming, content creation, marketing, system administration. I like that SEO people are skilled in all these areas, it frustrates me though that they’ve relabelled it as something new, when it shouldn’t really be.
Furthermore, the sleazier ones have made life tough for us, as they’re promising potential clients all sorts of crazy things, that they simply can’t deliver.
Regards,
Des
Link | October 13th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
Hi Des,
You clearly only work for organisations with a CMMI level of “manage” or above. Most organisations putting up web sites are not so blessed.
Much of what I do is troubleshooting. Here’s an example from yesterday:
A moderately large page count web fronted database site with an extensive product catalog. Assume that several hundred items are added, removed or modified every day (that’s several hundred of each operation). Assume that the site is poorly designed for flow, taxonomy and ontology. Assume that it has been assembled by people who haven’t bothered to generate a Last-Modified Date – so the SE’s can’t tell what is up to date and what hasn’t been touched, requiring exhaustive crawling as the only way to find new stuff. A quarter of the links are 400 (not 404, but 400). A quarter of the remainder are 404. Some pages are delivered blank if there is nothing of that description in stock. There are missing category pages – there’s simply no stable URL for anything resembling a category page, for 80-90% of the products. All of the Titles and Descriptions are templated – such that 75% of the site has grammatically nonsensical descriptions in the Search Engines.
Add a further constraint. The budget to solve this is only high enough to allow one of your specialist roles to work on the project. Which specialist will you choose?
I used skills from programming, system admin, UI design, marketing communications, DB administration, sitemaps, the robot exclusion protocol, knowledge management, social media, and about 14 years experience of web sites… Because the goal is to turn that site into a high ranking, high traffic site, that users will value. It is do-able, and it is do-able for less than the cost of redesigning from scratch – which is what I’d prefer to do, if there were time and budget enough. There will be some changes, but remarkably fewer changes than a whole site redesign. It won’t get as much rank as a fully redesigned site will do, but this will give the business enough trade that it can contemplate doing so, next year.
I’m quite annoyed by link spammers, too. But I don’t go calling web designers bullshit, just because the majority of sites that I see are the products of ignorance and incompetence.
Cheers, JeremyC.
Link | October 15th, 2008 at 8:06 am