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Ask HN: Overcoming engineer/developer bias against SEO

51 points by randfish 16y ago

I was out to lunch today with a fellow startup CEO who commented that our company (SEOmoz) was likely having a much harder time finding remarkable engineers to hire due to the negative perceptions about SEO as an industry and business practice. In his experience, even very smart, talented people from this background tended to have closed minds on this topic. Since we specifically discussed the Hacker News community, I thought it valuable and worthwhile to post here and see if the community had opinions on the topic and, perhaps, could share ways in which we could help overcome it. My sense is that HN is generally filled with smart, open-minded people who love applying science and technology to marketing (or any other problem), yet SEO (and web marketing as a whole) seems to attract derision, often without context. Love to hear your thoughts. --- RE our specific situation: We're hiring primarily for folks to work on our web crawl, processing & machine learning platforms (as well as some front-end applications that plug into these systems). A good comparison would be Google's/Yahoo!'s/MS's teams in the early days working on 50 billion+ page indices, metric construction, crawling, serving, etc. We've heard that these are typically interesting, sexy problems, but that the "SEO" industry bias is working against us.

pearanalytics 16y ago
Hi Rand, At Pear Analytics, we haven't experienced that at all. In fact, most developers will tell you that they no nothing about SEO anyway, so I'm not sure where the bias would come from. Engineers are attracted to solving problems they've never solved before. We've had plenty of issues dealing with external API's, Google's ridiculousness, queuing systems, data storage and more - yet they continue to find ways to get around these issues. You guys seem to be located where there is a wealth of talent, and with your success - I am surprised finding the engineers you need is difficult. I would say keep the focus less on the SEO, and more on the solution/problem you are trying to solve, and making it sexy to the end user. Maybe that will get some attention. Ryan Kelly
mitchellhislop 16y ago
As a coder, I would enjoy those problems. Maybe its a framing issue-if you frame the jobs as you did here, rather than "work for an SEO company", maybe that would help?
- MediaSquirrel 16y ago
  Yeah, when I think SEO i think of the sleazy guy who has a gigantic link farm that if I pay him, will link to me. Part of it, as it seems to me, is that I simply don't understand what SEO research involves, and assume it means doing bad/lame stuff. adding transparency to the job/process would probably make it sexier, assuming that there's some real substance underneath...
- randfish 16y ago
  Yeah, we've generally tried to position ourselves in this fashion, but with SEO in our name (SEOmoz) and with core values of transparency and authenticity, we'd prefer not to try to hide who we are or what we do. We believe whole-heartedly in our mission: To simplify the promotion of ideas on the web. SEO is the first part of that puzzle. Also - if you're interested and are in Seattle (or could be talked into moving here) please drop me a line - rand@seomoz.org
  - nl 16y ago
    I agree that the name is a huge problem. SEO is off putting in itself, but then appending "moz" makes it seem like you are trying to have some association with Mozilla too. I know you guys are well established, and I've read some of your stuff with interest, but that name is terrible. You should try setting up a separate entity called "Search Analytics & Research" or something that does the actual engineering, and try A/B testing job ads. I bet you'd get a hugely different response.
  - ktsmith 16y ago
    Your transparency has probably generated more good will than you know. My wife and I are planning on relocating some time in the next year, probably to the Seattle area. As part of this I've already started to take a look at what jobs are available and just yesterday I came across your craigslist postings. While having spent the last three years working for a marketing company and dealing with some sleazy SEO people I would have normally just bypassed any ad with SEO anywhere in it, but seeing that it was seomoz I actually took the time to read it. You are probably fighting an uphill battle. Last year I had to do a technical integration with another company and it turned out they were actively paying something like $30k per month to an SEO company to keep them in the top five results on the big three search engines. All of that money was going to black hat methods such as link farms, paid links, cloaking etc. These tactics were all working and for a very long time their sites were the number one and two links for dozens of relevant terms with the big search engines. As those tactics worked, my employer very much wanted us to start employing them, ignoring the objections of the design and engineering team. About six months later we were heavily involved in a project for another company that was supposedly run by an SEO expert. His expertise turned out to be having read a three year old E-book on the topic. While I've provided two anecdotal examples, from everyone I've talked to these types of examples seem to be the most prevalent. Or maybe people only talk about their negative SEO experiences. It's not even cut and dry for those companies that appear to be doing things right. Look at some of the backlash on reddit when people figured out that oatmeal used to work at seomoz.
smallblacksun 16y ago
SEO makes it harder for people to find useful information on the web instead of what someone spent time and money to "optimize" for Google. Developers know this, and so generally dislike SEO.
- modoc 16y ago
  Bad SEO does that. Good SEO makes it easier for people to find the information they were looking for. It's a race.
  - mquander 16y ago
    But good SEO is mostly easy, common-sense techniques that don't change very often. Bad SEO (gaming the system) is the hard part, and I have to imagine it's mostly the part people are willing to pay a lot of money for.
    - patio11 16y ago
      But good SEO is mostly easy, common-sense techniques that don't change very often This is sort of like saying "good programming is mostly easy, common-sense techniques that don't change very often", and since programming is a solved problem, anybody willing to pay a lot of money for programmers is clearly getting something hinky done. Programming is not a solved problem. Neither is marketing. SEO exists at the intersection of programming and marketing. Every site and every business brings their own unique challenges to the mix, and they're not all addressable with "Slap some alt tags on those images and you're good to go", any more than you can solve any programming problem with "Rewrite it... with more AJAX!" SEO for many startups will involve, among other considerations, "How do we convince our users to create? How do we convince our users to share?" Those are core product/marketing questions for many startups, but they're equally core to the SEO strategy, and they're tricky to get right. For that sort of startup, you could imagine someone looking over their widget's viral activity with the amount of intensity that Zynga spends on its viral channels, because sharing via the widget creates several types of value for the company (via direct traffic, branding, and ranking effects).
patio11 16y ago
I think HN is gradually, gradually warming to SEO. I remember way back when I was lurking here someone had a comment along the lines of they would be a hired assassin prior to doing SEO consulting. These days folks discuss SEO strategy here with some regularity, and it generally doesn't cause vitriolic reactions when it is perceived as non-manipulative. I think it is a matter of continuing to demonstrate very basic things such as "SEO works", "SEO will make your business money", and "SEO is not black magic voodoo practiced by a bunch of ebook selling charlatans who will teaching you to Make Money Online". If I were trying to get a bunch of savvy startups on board with SEO, I'd be banging the drum on how SEO is an absurdly effective force multiplier for startups, small businesses, and other resource-constrained entities who have agility, deep technical knowledge, personality, a story to tell, and all the other unfair advantages that warm me to my blackened SEO heart. If you're doing business on the Internet, you're almost certainly critically dependent on SEO these days. (Some businesses more critically than others: I could imagine B2B with horrifically long sales cycles that get very little accomplished online not worrying about SEO too much, and Facebook/iPhone apps get a pass in today's market. But for selling B2C or B2SmallBusiness web applications? Crikey, SEO is about as important as issues get.) Oh, and educating people about what SEOs actually do for a living helps. (I mentioned at the time, too, but I really liked the presentation to YC about it.) Except, don't mention the roasted baby parties. I don't think they're ready for roasted baby. We'll start with kitty milkshakes and work our way up gradually.
- thetrumanshow 16y ago
  I don't think I've warmed to SEO, necessarily. I just realize that unless the good guys start using the black magic, then the victory belongs only to the spammers. Wait, I wonder if the spammers think of themselves as good guys too...
  - randfish 16y ago
    Hmm... I think maybe this is where a big part of the problem lies. SEO hasn't been "black magic" for a long time now, and most of the "black magic" that worked from 1997-2003 is dead and gone, replaced by creative marketing, accessibility and best practices. But perhaps that message has been drowned out by the ongoing perception from those early years of SEO? BTW - this might be good material to explain my point above - http://ycombinator.posterous.com/the-first-yc-conference http://ycombinator.posterous.com/the-first-yc-conference
petervandijck 16y ago
Perhaps blogging about the exciting (and non-sleazy) tech would help?
modoc 16y ago
The biggest issue is the difference between: SEO=link farming, spamming blogs, generated blogs/sites, etc... SEO=building accessible standards compliant markup, making it easy for people to find content they were actually looking for, etc... My gut reaction to hearing "SEO Company" makes me think of #1, even though I know "good" SEO is really just good page development, good content, good use of keywords, etc... As an engineer I'd prefer to hear about standards compliant markup, accessible (508/WAI), canonical URLs, clear DOM structure, and developing content to better serve users: which is really what it's all about.
- ronnoch 16y ago
  You're exactly right about the difference, and I'd add that bias against SEO is dangerous in the second case because the good kind of SEO is absolutely critical to the success of most sites. Catering to the user and offering content / services that people want should be the #1 priority, but if Google doesn't index your site properly then the people who want it will never see it.
  - dedward 16y ago
    Except, just as with SPAM, clever SEO strategy can be far more than just best practices. The right ad-buys and keywords at the right time in certain businesses can generate extremely attractive CPA numbers compared to other methods of marketing. Yes, it's a bit of evil mixed in with good - what marketing isn't, but but it can be extremely effective, especially if your business depends heavily on search engine ranking. Convince the client you can bring them converted, spending customers at a CPA they'll like, without tarnishing their overall reputation, and you've got a winner.
mhd 16y ago
I think that most people here prefer "any other problem" to marketing.
- sokoloff 16y ago
  As an engineer for a decade and a half (turned tech manager, now), I used to have that same feeling. I believe that's because until you work with a competent marketing group, there's an awful lot of "Dilbert marketing department" evident. And truly competent marketing groups are only slightly more plentiful than unicorns, IME. Work alongside a good marketing team however, and it's night and day. I think that they have in many cases more interesting problems, especially in the context of growing a startup. How can you tell a good marketing department? They're smart, able and willing to do math, are willing to be data and metrics driven and can't comprehend it could work any other way. If someone says to you "math has no place in marketing", you don't want to work with that marketing department.
  - mhd 16y ago
    Indeed, the usual marketing often combines the worst aspect of sleazy sales guys and irrational artsy types. Never mind that marketing departments have a high female percentage, and girls are scary. Scientifically-minded marketing seems pretty rare. Or to put it another way: Quite often there are some scientifically-minded marketeers in the team, but no one tends to listen to them.
  - mattgratt 16y ago
    Telling good marketing departments from bad marketing departments is really hard, and highly dependent on context. What might be a great marketing team for an enterprise software or SaaS company might make an awful marketing team for a consumer focused startup. Good technology marketers generally are a) ex-engineers (this is a spay-shul breed of person), often those who went out in the field and sold when push came to shove or b) people that sincerely like technology and have lots of field experience. A bad marketer says "Everything is a widget (or cpg.)" A good marketer says "Every buying process in every vertical is different and highly sensitive." Generally, marketers arrive as communication-oriented (PR/Marcomm experience), technology-oriented (PMM/PM experience), or sales-oriented (former sales person, cares more about qualified leads than raw names and phone numbers.) Read Steve Blank's book - most people point to him as one of the best marketers in Silicon Valley - or read about his adventures as head of the SuperMac marketing department - http://steveblank.com/category/supermac/ http://steveblank.com/category/supermac/ - That's what a GREAT marketer does. But, yes, good tech marketers are rarer than hen's teeth. Most people in marketing are there because they lack the logical abilities to be an engineer and the courage to be a salesperson. (This is coming from a marketer.) Generally, really good marketers know the hell out of their market, and know what metrics they're working towards. They should know every influencer in their field by name and viewpoint, if not personally. If anything, they really need to think of themselves as 'Market Response Engineers,' trying to find out what the market will do in response to the messages they communicate. Additionally, avoid people who work/have worked at ad agencies. They know how to drink, not how to market things.
briandoll 16y ago
Here is why I would never personally work for an SEO company: (Obviously just my opinion, with all the bias that carries) Search engines are very interesting, technologically. Optimizing a search engine would be extremely interesting. Optimizing websites to keep up with the changes of somebody else's business (the search engine) is not interesting. You're playing catch-up. You essentially attempting to reverse engineer interesting problems, and applying methods to take advantage of the internals of those algorithms for your customers. In 1999 you would have been wildly successful telling people they could put a ton of keywords on their website, using the same font color as their site background color to boost ranking without affecting user-visible content. That worked, for a while. Then it didn't. The technology to "optimize" content for search engines have changed, but the concepts are still the same. You're trying to game the system, and I personally don't find that interesting nor rewarding.
- randfish 16y ago
  Fair points. We're working to figure out what works and provide software to message that and help businesses optimize. It's not just for search engines (we try to help with, for example, how/why people retweet, link, share content, "like" on FB, etc), but the point is a reasonable one; optimizing against existing systems vs. creating something new may be part of the issue. Thanks for sharing, Brian.
  - dejb 16y ago
    > It's not just for search engines (we try to help with, for example, how/why people retweet, link, share content, "like" on FB, ... and how to get a popular item on news.yc :) I guess it just goes to prove your point that you can can promote your brand without being spamy.
- sjs382 16y ago
  It isn't about keyword-stuffing (and hiding these keywords from users) anymore. It's about optimizing a site for organic traffic and having a true focus on who the customer is. Use the Betty Ford Center, a residential drug and alcohol treatment center, as an example. You want to optimize for "private" and "recovery" rather than dilute your site with keywords like "clinic" which don't serve your target audience.* _This_ is what effective SEO is about. It's only "gaming the system" in the same way that traditional advertising is--you want to do your best to get your message in front of the right eyes. * "Clinic" is often associated with "cheap" or "free" by customers who are a better fit for the Betty Ford Center.
deleted 16y ago
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garyrichardson 16y ago
At our last weekly meeting, we were discussing implementing SEO. My gut reaction was to question the decision to work with snake oil salesmen. Luckily, I thought before I spoke. I think SEO needs a new acronym to differentiate between spammy abuse SEO and site structure/good practices. Maybe Search Engine Readability? Search Engine Compatibility?
trey 16y ago
As a programmer at a fairly high traffic site, SEO is a way of life for us and we always think of SEO implications. The more difficult problem we have lately is the SEO vs user experience trade off. We dislike whenever SEO is chosen over the user experience.
- randfish 16y ago
  I completely agree Trey - I'd say that over the last 5 years, I've almost never (maybe once) seen a case where SEO had to interfere with or detract from good user experience. The engines have actually done a great job making this an extreme edge case.
  - modoc 16y ago
    I've seen several instances where in order to make really nice JS/AJAX UI interactions and flows also SEO friendly we had to do a lot of extra work. However that work also makes us accessible, so it's not the end of the world....
- Making8 16y ago
  The biggest misconception about SEO is that its intent is to be spammy. SEO is in fact directed towards more effective communication with search engines. Using web analytics, and intelligence we optimize content to be more direct towards users, and search engines by using keywords etc that users are searching for. We're basically improving communications just like quality CRM does only with search engines, and users. Link farms are highly transparent and easily flagged by Google. They have extremely sophisticated algorithms to determine who the spammers are.
jolan 16y ago
If SEOmoz wasn't good enough for the oatmeal then it's not good enough for me.
Making8 16y ago
Rand I believe you should consider your company a "Search, and Analytics" company more so than an SEO company due to the context/bias that SEO has. The scope of work that SEOmoz does is quite a bit beyond traditional SEO work etc.
- randfish 16y ago
  Yeah - certainly. And I think our branding around software for SEOs speaks to that, but the branding of "SEO" in general is something we think about a lot, too. We're not just trying to improve our image or brand, we want to make the brand of "SEO" something people like/enjoy/respect/appreciate.
thinkbohemian 16y ago
I see hackernews SEO articles quite frequently, i even submitted one that did quite well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270748 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270748 so i think you're on the right track by asking here. That being the case, why don't you just edit your post and include a "we're hiring" link! Aside from that diving into the technical details "sexy problems" first in any type of job listing may prove helpful since it sounds more like they'll be very technically involved. If the SEO moniker is really really hurting your prospects, consider creating a shell company such as Initech (generic and tech related) when posting and wait till they're warmed up to the technology before you tell them it will be for SEO. In all honesty though i think you would be better off finding someone not only excited about the sexy problems, but someone who is interested in SEO...maybe harder and longer but would pay off in the long run...if you figure out a good answer to your own problem, then let us know!
kirvero 16y ago
I deal with this a lot. I think there are 3 problems: a) the underlying need for SEO is equivalent to the underlying need for taxes. Or apartment brokers. Or other hated but essential intermediaries. SEO is a necessary lubricant, but in a perfect world, it doesn't exist. b) the context SEO operates in is derivative, not fundamental. SEO may need to deal with 50b+ indexes, but the context is not google. The context is parasitic. c) the business model and ROI calculations of many SEO companies are self-serving, magical, non-scientific, and non-provable. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with SEO people where I suggest doing an experiment, and all I hear are crickets and fear.
bravura 16y ago
Perhaps your first problem is that there isn't even a "Careers" or "Jobs" link on your homepage, and Googling "seomoz jobs" and "seomoz careers" leads to a job board and not your company's hiring page? Seriously, I am interested in hearing about your machine learning openings, and I can't even find the job description anywhere.
- randfish 16y ago
  Wow... Great point. We used to have a callout in our top menu nav, but it's pointedly missing. I'll definitely get on that with the team. In regards to openings: http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/sof/1757631095.html http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/sof/1757631095.html is what's currently up.
throwaway123 16y ago
Let me explain why I have learned to hate SEO over the years. I'm writing this from a throwaway HN account. I work for a 4-year old company, where I was one of the first 3 employees. We have a very popular website that gets over 400 million page views per month. We get lots of traffic from Google. When I started, our priority was making a great, simple user interface. But we were also very aware of SEO, and paid much attention to self-links we put on the site, anchor text, URL parameters, all the usual smart SEO stuff. So far so good -- we did this opportunistically, and never at the expense of the user experience. As we grew, we hired a person dedicated to SEO (a non-programmer). Then we hired another. These SEO people started having us add links and pages in strange places that made no sense to actual users. And adding links that sometimes made sense to users, but were unnecessary, and cluttered the user interface. The page footer grew and grew, eventually spanning 3 lines. We added funny redirect schemes that made the site slower for users. We were afraid of our links to other sites because we might leak valuable "Google juice". We added redundant tooltips that were useless to users. Many of these tactics were crap our SEO people read on some webmaster SEO forum, with no scientific basis. Sometimes our SEO people even had the gall to say "I have an idea I think will be better for the user experience", and go on to propose something that only benefited SEO, and made the user experience worse! In other words, they would focus on GETTING the user (via Google), but forgot about KEEPING the user (through good user experience). Thankfully, we never did the black-hat methods like cloaking, but some things very close were proposed and met with loud opposition from our developers. For a long time I would fight against these changes, because they made the UI worse. I lost most of these battles because it was hard to convince the managers that it was hurting the site (but it never seemed to be necessary for the SEO people to prove it was actually helping SEO). I was eventually spending so much energy fighting these SEO proposals that I just gave up. User interface designers and developers spend a lot of effort to make a web site look good and run fast. Then the SEO people go and fuck it up. It's very frustrating for developers. I know SEO is important. All I'm saying is that SEO should never be at the expense of the user experience. I hate what it has done to our web site, and I know it's happened to other websites as well.
- CyberFonic 16y ago
  Did you try A-B testing to verify that the SEO tweaks actually did produce improvements? Seems to me that the absence of testing makes it difficult to verify the improvements that any specific SEO attempt might make. Unfortunately, there are too many SEO 'hand-wavers' trying to cash in on the widespread ignorance. From what I've seen genuine SEO results are a lot harder work than the SEO-oil salesmen would admit.
divinewrite 16y ago
I've worked in SEO for 6 years (I'm an SEO copywriter), and I know there's good and bad in the industry, as in any industry. In SEO, I think the biggest problem is a lack of respect for the audience. That's why you get sites with poor usability, as described by throwaway123 below. But it's not always the SEOs who are responsible for that. Remember, they're being paid by someone. Yes, there are times when the SEO's client DOESN'T understand the impact of the SEO they're commissioning. But there are also times when they do. It's easy to blame the practitioners here, and often that blame is justified. But we only have to look around us to remember that business -- big or small -- is generally far more interested in short term gain than long term customer satisfaction. So it should come as no surprise that many businesses are prepared to turn a blind eye to practices that hinder usability and visitor value. The other common problem in SEO is ineptitude. Many people call themselves SEOs when really they're just opportunistic freelancers and entrepreneurs. Their SEO knowledge is poor and their business management skills lacking. This ultimately impacts EVERYONE connected with the job, even those only remotely connected (like the good SEOs out there).
mikesimonsen 16y ago
Rand - It sure seems like you're recruiting sophisticated application engineers, you're not recruiting SEO engineers. That is, this is a recruiting problem (yours) not a perception problem (theirs). Focus your headline on the sexy work you're recruiting the engineers for, not the market your customers are in. Why mention SEO at all in your recruiting? Oo turn it on it's head and address the fear in your recruiting efforts. Like, "how can a gig as awesome as this possibly be found in the slimy, shady underworld of search engine optimization? mwahaha." Maybe I'm biased because I'm an SEOmoz client, but I'd imagine that once they get past the initial hurdle that your firm doesn't fit a preconception about SEO anyway. So get em over that initial bump.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
Sadly, SEO is a loaded and abused term. A lot of SEO is helpful, making your site friendlier to search engine tools. But the term also tends to include less above-board efforts, such as search engine exploitation, gaming the system, all the way to web spam, link farms, content scraping, etc. At this point it's probably better to just come up with a different term than attempt to reclaim SEO from the exploiters.
marssaxman 16y ago
I'm a software engineer, and I've been browsing seattle.craigslist.org recently looking for something new. Your ads hit enough of my keywords to pop up in my search, but I move right past as soon as I see the letters "SEO". Maybe your company actually is awesome and totally working for the betterment of the world, but you've chosen a label for yourselves that was invented to describe the bad guys. Your ad could hold my attention longer by dropping the term "SEO", but I'd still decide you were probably just a bunch of spammers as soon as I saw the words "improve their rankings in search engines". I don't want sites to come up in search engines because someone paid a lot of money to put them there; I want sites to come up in search engines because they are a good match for what I'm trying to find. If you're gaming Google, you're making the Internet less useful, and there's no way I could work for you in good conscience. Now, maybe what you're actually doing isn't so much gaming Google as it is teaching your customers how to build good web sites. Maybe you're teaching them to write good headlines, use quality hyperlinks, add a lot of useful, interesting content, get content out from behind paywalls and flash blobs, and so on; or maybe you've come up with some fascinating statistical analysis that lets people know how searchable their content is. If so, that's great: but why drag yourselves down with the poisoned label "SEO"? It's like calling yourselves "SpamWorks", or "BotNetMasters", or advertising your skills at obfuscating Cialis ads. Web marketing attracts derision because web marketers make the Internet suck. Maybe you're a step above the spammers of the world, but you're not helping your case by marketing yourselves under their label.
- Sujan 16y ago
  Okay, here we found an interesting bit: > [...] but you've chosen a label for yourselves that was invented to describe the bad guys. For me, probably randfish and lots of other people, some of them working in this industry, the word SEO just doesn't mean this.
  - marssaxman 16y ago
    I have no doubt that you're right, but this isn't about what you think or what randfish thinks: it's about what the people he's trying to recruit think. Speaking as a member of his potential recruitment pool, there's nothing in the job ad that distinguishes SEOmoz from any other company talking about "SEO" or "improv[ing] their rankings in search engines", and as a result I get the impression that SEOmoz is just another bunch of sleazeballs making money by ruining the Internet for everyone else. If that is true, then great: they're marketing themselves effectively. If it's not true, they might not want to use terminology so directly associated with the asshole spammers of the world.
AJmorgans 16y ago
SEOMoz is a reputable company and love going there for all types of SEO information. The community is large and growing larger. Most people are searching for SEO related solutions for Wordpress blogs and I think the best solution so far is.. http://www.seodestination.com/wp-seo/ http://www.seodestination.com/wp-seo/ any other tips?
throwaway321 16y ago
Here's why I loathe SEO (the term and the industry): It shouldn't exist. There's "good" and "bad" SEO. "Bad" SEO is snake oil, it's cheating, it's gaming the system for commercial purposes. It's a race to the bottom to see who can screw up their UX and the Internet in general the most to get the most clicks from Google. It's evil. "Good" SEO, though, is nothing but common sense. Search engines emphasise good structure, semantics, accessibility and practises, and this is what "good" SEO takes advantage of. But good developers know if you're doing your job in the first place, there's no need for "good" SEO. That's why we don't like SEO; it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. If you can somehow stealthily introduce good practises in the guise of SEO, then I guess that's good, but we cringe at the thought of having to label it like that to get acceptance.
ajdecon 16y ago
Sometimes a term becomes so strongly associated with unethical behavior that it can't be used in a more positive context. I think this is true for "SEO". In theory there should be no cognitive bias against the idea of optimizing a site design to make it easily searchable; but historically this term is associated with shady practices. One of your comments states that you want to make "SEO" a brand people respect. I don't think this is going to happen in the short term, when the experienced engineers you want to hire remember cursing the unethical behavior of other SEO practitioners.
danielsim 16y ago
Very interesting question. We founded Plug in SEO a year ago and at the time came up against lots of anti-SEO prejudice. The scene has definately changed, at least here in the UK. The prejudge has been replaced with robust questions about its benefit. As for recruitment, if your SEO solution is genuinely an arms race of outmanouvering search engines, as an engineer myself I'd have passed over the opportunity. Personally I relish solving problems but not reinventing the wheel or gaming search engines.

51 points by randfish 16y ago

pearanalytics 16y ago

Hi Rand, At Pear Analytics, we haven't experienced that at all. In fact, most developers will tell you that they no nothing about SEO anyway, so I'm not sure where the bias would come from. Engineers are attracted to solving problems they've never solved before. We've had plenty of issues dealing with external API's, Google's ridiculousness, queuing systems, data storage and more - yet they continue to find ways to get around these issues. You guys seem to be located where there is a wealth of talent, and with your success - I am surprised finding the engineers you need is difficult. I would say keep the focus less on the SEO, and more on the solution/problem you are trying to solve, and making it sexy to the end user. Maybe that will get some attention. Ryan Kelly

mitchellhislop 16y ago

As a coder, I would enjoy those problems. Maybe its a framing issue-if you frame the jobs as you did here, rather than "work for an SEO company", maybe that would help?

MediaSquirrel 16y ago
Yeah, when I think SEO i think of the sleazy guy who has a gigantic link farm that if I pay him, will link to me. Part of it, as it seems to me, is that I simply don't understand what SEO research involves, and assume it means doing bad/lame stuff. adding transparency to the job/process would probably make it sexier, assuming that there's some real substance underneath...
randfish 16y ago
Yeah, we've generally tried to position ourselves in this fashion, but with SEO in our name (SEOmoz) and with core values of transparency and authenticity, we'd prefer not to try to hide who we are or what we do. We believe whole-heartedly in our mission: To simplify the promotion of ideas on the web. SEO is the first part of that puzzle. Also - if you're interested and are in Seattle (or could be talked into moving here) please drop me a line - rand@seomoz.org
- nl 16y ago
  I agree that the name is a huge problem. SEO is off putting in itself, but then appending "moz" makes it seem like you are trying to have some association with Mozilla too. I know you guys are well established, and I've read some of your stuff with interest, but that name is terrible. You should try setting up a separate entity called "Search Analytics & Research" or something that does the actual engineering, and try A/B testing job ads. I bet you'd get a hugely different response.
- ktsmith 16y ago
  Your transparency has probably generated more good will than you know. My wife and I are planning on relocating some time in the next year, probably to the Seattle area. As part of this I've already started to take a look at what jobs are available and just yesterday I came across your craigslist postings. While having spent the last three years working for a marketing company and dealing with some sleazy SEO people I would have normally just bypassed any ad with SEO anywhere in it, but seeing that it was seomoz I actually took the time to read it. You are probably fighting an uphill battle. Last year I had to do a technical integration with another company and it turned out they were actively paying something like $30k per month to an SEO company to keep them in the top five results on the big three search engines. All of that money was going to black hat methods such as link farms, paid links, cloaking etc. These tactics were all working and for a very long time their sites were the number one and two links for dozens of relevant terms with the big search engines. As those tactics worked, my employer very much wanted us to start employing them, ignoring the objections of the design and engineering team. About six months later we were heavily involved in a project for another company that was supposedly run by an SEO expert. His expertise turned out to be having read a three year old E-book on the topic. While I've provided two anecdotal examples, from everyone I've talked to these types of examples seem to be the most prevalent. Or maybe people only talk about their negative SEO experiences. It's not even cut and dry for those companies that appear to be doing things right. Look at some of the backlash on reddit when people figured out that oatmeal used to work at seomoz.

smallblacksun 16y ago

SEO makes it harder for people to find useful information on the web instead of what someone spent time and money to "optimize" for Google. Developers know this, and so generally dislike SEO.

modoc 16y ago
Bad SEO does that. Good SEO makes it easier for people to find the information they were looking for. It's a race.
- mquander 16y ago
  But good SEO is mostly easy, common-sense techniques that don't change very often. Bad SEO (gaming the system) is the hard part, and I have to imagine it's mostly the part people are willing to pay a lot of money for.
  - patio11 16y ago
    But good SEO is mostly easy, common-sense techniques that don't change very often This is sort of like saying "good programming is mostly easy, common-sense techniques that don't change very often", and since programming is a solved problem, anybody willing to pay a lot of money for programmers is clearly getting something hinky done. Programming is not a solved problem. Neither is marketing. SEO exists at the intersection of programming and marketing. Every site and every business brings their own unique challenges to the mix, and they're not all addressable with "Slap some alt tags on those images and you're good to go", any more than you can solve any programming problem with "Rewrite it... with more AJAX!" SEO for many startups will involve, among other considerations, "How do we convince our users to create? How do we convince our users to share?" Those are core product/marketing questions for many startups, but they're equally core to the SEO strategy, and they're tricky to get right. For that sort of startup, you could imagine someone looking over their widget's viral activity with the amount of intensity that Zynga spends on its viral channels, because sharing via the widget creates several types of value for the company (via direct traffic, branding, and ranking effects).

patio11 16y ago

I think HN is gradually, gradually warming to SEO. I remember way back when I was lurking here someone had a comment along the lines of they would be a hired assassin prior to doing SEO consulting. These days folks discuss SEO strategy here with some regularity, and it generally doesn't cause vitriolic reactions when it is perceived as non-manipulative. I think it is a matter of continuing to demonstrate very basic things such as "SEO works", "SEO will make your business money", and "SEO is not black magic voodoo practiced by a bunch of ebook selling charlatans who will teaching you to Make Money Online". If I were trying to get a bunch of savvy startups on board with SEO, I'd be banging the drum on how SEO is an absurdly effective force multiplier for startups, small businesses, and other resource-constrained entities who have agility, deep technical knowledge, personality, a story to tell, and all the other unfair advantages that warm me to my blackened SEO heart. If you're doing business on the Internet, you're almost certainly critically dependent on SEO these days. (Some businesses more critically than others: I could imagine B2B with horrifically long sales cycles that get very little accomplished online not worrying about SEO too much, and Facebook/iPhone apps get a pass in today's market. But for selling B2C or B2SmallBusiness web applications? Crikey, SEO is about as important as issues get.) Oh, and educating people about what SEOs actually do for a living helps. (I mentioned at the time, too, but I really liked the presentation to YC about it.) Except, don't mention the roasted baby parties. I don't think they're ready for roasted baby. We'll start with kitty milkshakes and work our way up gradually.

thetrumanshow 16y ago
I don't think I've warmed to SEO, necessarily. I just realize that unless the good guys start using the black magic, then the victory belongs only to the spammers. Wait, I wonder if the spammers think of themselves as good guys too...
- randfish 16y ago
  Hmm... I think maybe this is where a big part of the problem lies. SEO hasn't been "black magic" for a long time now, and most of the "black magic" that worked from 1997-2003 is dead and gone, replaced by creative marketing, accessibility and best practices. But perhaps that message has been drowned out by the ongoing perception from those early years of SEO? BTW - this might be good material to explain my point above - http://ycombinator.posterous.com/the-first-yc-conference http://ycombinator.posterous.com/the-first-yc-conference

petervandijck 16y ago

Perhaps blogging about the exciting (and non-sleazy) tech would help?

modoc 16y ago

The biggest issue is the difference between: SEO=link farming, spamming blogs, generated blogs/sites, etc... SEO=building accessible standards compliant markup, making it easy for people to find content they were actually looking for, etc... My gut reaction to hearing "SEO Company" makes me think of #1, even though I know "good" SEO is really just good page development, good content, good use of keywords, etc... As an engineer I'd prefer to hear about standards compliant markup, accessible (508/WAI), canonical URLs, clear DOM structure, and developing content to better serve users: which is really what it's all about.

ronnoch 16y ago
You're exactly right about the difference, and I'd add that bias against SEO is dangerous in the second case because the good kind of SEO is absolutely critical to the success of most sites. Catering to the user and offering content / services that people want should be the #1 priority, but if Google doesn't index your site properly then the people who want it will never see it.
- dedward 16y ago
  Except, just as with SPAM, clever SEO strategy can be far more than just best practices. The right ad-buys and keywords at the right time in certain businesses can generate extremely attractive CPA numbers compared to other methods of marketing. Yes, it's a bit of evil mixed in with good - what marketing isn't, but but it can be extremely effective, especially if your business depends heavily on search engine ranking. Convince the client you can bring them converted, spending customers at a CPA they'll like, without tarnishing their overall reputation, and you've got a winner.

mhd 16y ago

I think that most people here prefer "any other problem" to marketing.

sokoloff 16y ago
As an engineer for a decade and a half (turned tech manager, now), I used to have that same feeling. I believe that's because until you work with a competent marketing group, there's an awful lot of "Dilbert marketing department" evident. And truly competent marketing groups are only slightly more plentiful than unicorns, IME. Work alongside a good marketing team however, and it's night and day. I think that they have in many cases more interesting problems, especially in the context of growing a startup. How can you tell a good marketing department? They're smart, able and willing to do math, are willing to be data and metrics driven and can't comprehend it could work any other way. If someone says to you "math has no place in marketing", you don't want to work with that marketing department.
- mhd 16y ago
  Indeed, the usual marketing often combines the worst aspect of sleazy sales guys and irrational artsy types. Never mind that marketing departments have a high female percentage, and girls are scary. Scientifically-minded marketing seems pretty rare. Or to put it another way: Quite often there are some scientifically-minded marketeers in the team, but no one tends to listen to them.
- mattgratt 16y ago
  Telling good marketing departments from bad marketing departments is really hard, and highly dependent on context. What might be a great marketing team for an enterprise software or SaaS company might make an awful marketing team for a consumer focused startup. Good technology marketers generally are a) ex-engineers (this is a spay-shul breed of person), often those who went out in the field and sold when push came to shove or b) people that sincerely like technology and have lots of field experience. A bad marketer says "Everything is a widget (or cpg.)" A good marketer says "Every buying process in every vertical is different and highly sensitive." Generally, marketers arrive as communication-oriented (PR/Marcomm experience), technology-oriented (PMM/PM experience), or sales-oriented (former sales person, cares more about qualified leads than raw names and phone numbers.) Read Steve Blank's book - most people point to him as one of the best marketers in Silicon Valley - or read about his adventures as head of the SuperMac marketing department - http://steveblank.com/category/supermac/ http://steveblank.com/category/supermac/ - That's what a GREAT marketer does. But, yes, good tech marketers are rarer than hen's teeth. Most people in marketing are there because they lack the logical abilities to be an engineer and the courage to be a salesperson. (This is coming from a marketer.) Generally, really good marketers know the hell out of their market, and know what metrics they're working towards. They should know every influencer in their field by name and viewpoint, if not personally. If anything, they really need to think of themselves as 'Market Response Engineers,' trying to find out what the market will do in response to the messages they communicate. Additionally, avoid people who work/have worked at ad agencies. They know how to drink, not how to market things.

briandoll 16y ago

Here is why I would never personally work for an SEO company: (Obviously just my opinion, with all the bias that carries) Search engines are very interesting, technologically. Optimizing a search engine would be extremely interesting. Optimizing websites to keep up with the changes of somebody else's business (the search engine) is not interesting. You're playing catch-up. You essentially attempting to reverse engineer interesting problems, and applying methods to take advantage of the internals of those algorithms for your customers. In 1999 you would have been wildly successful telling people they could put a ton of keywords on their website, using the same font color as their site background color to boost ranking without affecting user-visible content. That worked, for a while. Then it didn't. The technology to "optimize" content for search engines have changed, but the concepts are still the same. You're trying to game the system, and I personally don't find that interesting nor rewarding.

randfish 16y ago
Fair points. We're working to figure out what works and provide software to message that and help businesses optimize. It's not just for search engines (we try to help with, for example, how/why people retweet, link, share content, "like" on FB, etc), but the point is a reasonable one; optimizing against existing systems vs. creating something new may be part of the issue. Thanks for sharing, Brian.
- dejb 16y ago
  > It's not just for search engines (we try to help with, for example, how/why people retweet, link, share content, "like" on FB, ... and how to get a popular item on news.yc :) I guess it just goes to prove your point that you can can promote your brand without being spamy.
sjs382 16y ago
It isn't about keyword-stuffing (and hiding these keywords from users) anymore. It's about optimizing a site for organic traffic and having a true focus on who the customer is. Use the Betty Ford Center, a residential drug and alcohol treatment center, as an example. You want to optimize for "private" and "recovery" rather than dilute your site with keywords like "clinic" which don't serve your target audience.* _This_ is what effective SEO is about. It's only "gaming the system" in the same way that traditional advertising is--you want to do your best to get your message in front of the right eyes. * "Clinic" is often associated with "cheap" or "free" by customers who are a better fit for the Betty Ford Center.

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garyrichardson 16y ago

At our last weekly meeting, we were discussing implementing SEO. My gut reaction was to question the decision to work with snake oil salesmen. Luckily, I thought before I spoke. I think SEO needs a new acronym to differentiate between spammy abuse SEO and site structure/good practices. Maybe Search Engine Readability? Search Engine Compatibility?

trey 16y ago

As a programmer at a fairly high traffic site, SEO is a way of life for us and we always think of SEO implications. The more difficult problem we have lately is the SEO vs user experience trade off. We dislike whenever SEO is chosen over the user experience.

randfish 16y ago
I completely agree Trey - I'd say that over the last 5 years, I've almost never (maybe once) seen a case where SEO had to interfere with or detract from good user experience. The engines have actually done a great job making this an extreme edge case.
- modoc 16y ago
  I've seen several instances where in order to make really nice JS/AJAX UI interactions and flows also SEO friendly we had to do a lot of extra work. However that work also makes us accessible, so it's not the end of the world....
Making8 16y ago
The biggest misconception about SEO is that its intent is to be spammy. SEO is in fact directed towards more effective communication with search engines. Using web analytics, and intelligence we optimize content to be more direct towards users, and search engines by using keywords etc that users are searching for. We're basically improving communications just like quality CRM does only with search engines, and users. Link farms are highly transparent and easily flagged by Google. They have extremely sophisticated algorithms to determine who the spammers are.

jolan 16y ago

If SEOmoz wasn't good enough for the oatmeal then it's not good enough for me.

Making8 16y ago

Rand I believe you should consider your company a "Search, and Analytics" company more so than an SEO company due to the context/bias that SEO has. The scope of work that SEOmoz does is quite a bit beyond traditional SEO work etc.

randfish 16y ago
Yeah - certainly. And I think our branding around software for SEOs speaks to that, but the branding of "SEO" in general is something we think about a lot, too. We're not just trying to improve our image or brand, we want to make the brand of "SEO" something people like/enjoy/respect/appreciate.

thinkbohemian 16y ago

I see hackernews SEO articles quite frequently, i even submitted one that did quite well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270748 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270748 so i think you're on the right track by asking here. That being the case, why don't you just edit your post and include a "we're hiring" link! Aside from that diving into the technical details "sexy problems" first in any type of job listing may prove helpful since it sounds more like they'll be very technically involved. If the SEO moniker is really really hurting your prospects, consider creating a shell company such as Initech (generic and tech related) when posting and wait till they're warmed up to the technology before you tell them it will be for SEO. In all honesty though i think you would be better off finding someone not only excited about the sexy problems, but someone who is interested in SEO...maybe harder and longer but would pay off in the long run...if you figure out a good answer to your own problem, then let us know!

kirvero 16y ago

I deal with this a lot. I think there are 3 problems: a) the underlying need for SEO is equivalent to the underlying need for taxes. Or apartment brokers. Or other hated but essential intermediaries. SEO is a necessary lubricant, but in a perfect world, it doesn't exist. b) the context SEO operates in is derivative, not fundamental. SEO may need to deal with 50b+ indexes, but the context is not google. The context is parasitic. c) the business model and ROI calculations of many SEO companies are self-serving, magical, non-scientific, and non-provable. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with SEO people where I suggest doing an experiment, and all I hear are crickets and fear.

bravura 16y ago

Perhaps your first problem is that there isn't even a "Careers" or "Jobs" link on your homepage, and Googling "seomoz jobs" and "seomoz careers" leads to a job board and not your company's hiring page? Seriously, I am interested in hearing about your machine learning openings, and I can't even find the job description anywhere.

randfish 16y ago
Wow... Great point. We used to have a callout in our top menu nav, but it's pointedly missing. I'll definitely get on that with the team. In regards to openings: http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/sof/1757631095.html http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/sof/1757631095.html is what's currently up.

throwaway123 16y ago

Let me explain why I have learned to hate SEO over the years. I'm writing this from a throwaway HN account. I work for a 4-year old company, where I was one of the first 3 employees. We have a very popular website that gets over 400 million page views per month. We get lots of traffic from Google. When I started, our priority was making a great, simple user interface. But we were also very aware of SEO, and paid much attention to self-links we put on the site, anchor text, URL parameters, all the usual smart SEO stuff. So far so good -- we did this opportunistically, and never at the expense of the user experience. As we grew, we hired a person dedicated to SEO (a non-programmer). Then we hired another. These SEO people started having us add links and pages in strange places that made no sense to actual users. And adding links that sometimes made sense to users, but were unnecessary, and cluttered the user interface. The page footer grew and grew, eventually spanning 3 lines. We added funny redirect schemes that made the site slower for users. We were afraid of our links to other sites because we might leak valuable "Google juice". We added redundant tooltips that were useless to users. Many of these tactics were crap our SEO people read on some webmaster SEO forum, with no scientific basis. Sometimes our SEO people even had the gall to say "I have an idea I think will be better for the user experience", and go on to propose something that only benefited SEO, and made the user experience worse! In other words, they would focus on GETTING the user (via Google), but forgot about KEEPING the user (through good user experience). Thankfully, we never did the black-hat methods like cloaking, but some things very close were proposed and met with loud opposition from our developers. For a long time I would fight against these changes, because they made the UI worse. I lost most of these battles because it was hard to convince the managers that it was hurting the site (but it never seemed to be necessary for the SEO people to prove it was actually helping SEO). I was eventually spending so much energy fighting these SEO proposals that I just gave up. User interface designers and developers spend a lot of effort to make a web site look good and run fast. Then the SEO people go and fuck it up. It's very frustrating for developers. I know SEO is important. All I'm saying is that SEO should never be at the expense of the user experience. I hate what it has done to our web site, and I know it's happened to other websites as well.

CyberFonic 16y ago
Did you try A-B testing to verify that the SEO tweaks actually did produce improvements? Seems to me that the absence of testing makes it difficult to verify the improvements that any specific SEO attempt might make. Unfortunately, there are too many SEO 'hand-wavers' trying to cash in on the widespread ignorance. From what I've seen genuine SEO results are a lot harder work than the SEO-oil salesmen would admit.

divinewrite 16y ago

I've worked in SEO for 6 years (I'm an SEO copywriter), and I know there's good and bad in the industry, as in any industry. In SEO, I think the biggest problem is a lack of respect for the audience. That's why you get sites with poor usability, as described by throwaway123 below. But it's not always the SEOs who are responsible for that. Remember, they're being paid by someone. Yes, there are times when the SEO's client DOESN'T understand the impact of the SEO they're commissioning. But there are also times when they do. It's easy to blame the practitioners here, and often that blame is justified. But we only have to look around us to remember that business -- big or small -- is generally far more interested in short term gain than long term customer satisfaction. So it should come as no surprise that many businesses are prepared to turn a blind eye to practices that hinder usability and visitor value. The other common problem in SEO is ineptitude. Many people call themselves SEOs when really they're just opportunistic freelancers and entrepreneurs. Their SEO knowledge is poor and their business management skills lacking. This ultimately impacts EVERYONE connected with the job, even those only remotely connected (like the good SEOs out there).

mikesimonsen 16y ago

Rand - It sure seems like you're recruiting sophisticated application engineers, you're not recruiting SEO engineers. That is, this is a recruiting problem (yours) not a perception problem (theirs). Focus your headline on the sexy work you're recruiting the engineers for, not the market your customers are in. Why mention SEO at all in your recruiting? Oo turn it on it's head and address the fear in your recruiting efforts. Like, "how can a gig as awesome as this possibly be found in the slimy, shady underworld of search engine optimization? mwahaha." Maybe I'm biased because I'm an SEOmoz client, but I'd imagine that once they get past the initial hurdle that your firm doesn't fit a preconception about SEO anyway. So get em over that initial bump.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

Sadly, SEO is a loaded and abused term. A lot of SEO is helpful, making your site friendlier to search engine tools. But the term also tends to include less above-board efforts, such as search engine exploitation, gaming the system, all the way to web spam, link farms, content scraping, etc. At this point it's probably better to just come up with a different term than attempt to reclaim SEO from the exploiters.

marssaxman 16y ago

I'm a software engineer, and I've been browsing seattle.craigslist.org recently looking for something new. Your ads hit enough of my keywords to pop up in my search, but I move right past as soon as I see the letters "SEO". Maybe your company actually is awesome and totally working for the betterment of the world, but you've chosen a label for yourselves that was invented to describe the bad guys. Your ad could hold my attention longer by dropping the term "SEO", but I'd still decide you were probably just a bunch of spammers as soon as I saw the words "improve their rankings in search engines". I don't want sites to come up in search engines because someone paid a lot of money to put them there; I want sites to come up in search engines because they are a good match for what I'm trying to find. If you're gaming Google, you're making the Internet less useful, and there's no way I could work for you in good conscience. Now, maybe what you're actually doing isn't so much gaming Google as it is teaching your customers how to build good web sites. Maybe you're teaching them to write good headlines, use quality hyperlinks, add a lot of useful, interesting content, get content out from behind paywalls and flash blobs, and so on; or maybe you've come up with some fascinating statistical analysis that lets people know how searchable their content is. If so, that's great: but why drag yourselves down with the poisoned label "SEO"? It's like calling yourselves "SpamWorks", or "BotNetMasters", or advertising your skills at obfuscating Cialis ads. Web marketing attracts derision because web marketers make the Internet suck. Maybe you're a step above the spammers of the world, but you're not helping your case by marketing yourselves under their label.

Sujan 16y ago
Okay, here we found an interesting bit: > [...] but you've chosen a label for yourselves that was invented to describe the bad guys. For me, probably randfish and lots of other people, some of them working in this industry, the word SEO just doesn't mean this.
- marssaxman 16y ago
  I have no doubt that you're right, but this isn't about what you think or what randfish thinks: it's about what the people he's trying to recruit think. Speaking as a member of his potential recruitment pool, there's nothing in the job ad that distinguishes SEOmoz from any other company talking about "SEO" or "improv[ing] their rankings in search engines", and as a result I get the impression that SEOmoz is just another bunch of sleazeballs making money by ruining the Internet for everyone else. If that is true, then great: they're marketing themselves effectively. If it's not true, they might not want to use terminology so directly associated with the asshole spammers of the world.

AJmorgans 16y ago

SEOMoz is a reputable company and love going there for all types of SEO information. The community is large and growing larger. Most people are searching for SEO related solutions for Wordpress blogs and I think the best solution so far is.. http://www.seodestination.com/wp-seo/ http://www.seodestination.com/wp-seo/ any other tips?

throwaway321 16y ago

Here's why I loathe SEO (the term and the industry): It shouldn't exist. There's "good" and "bad" SEO. "Bad" SEO is snake oil, it's cheating, it's gaming the system for commercial purposes. It's a race to the bottom to see who can screw up their UX and the Internet in general the most to get the most clicks from Google. It's evil. "Good" SEO, though, is nothing but common sense. Search engines emphasise good structure, semantics, accessibility and practises, and this is what "good" SEO takes advantage of. But good developers know if you're doing your job in the first place, there's no need for "good" SEO. That's why we don't like SEO; it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. If you can somehow stealthily introduce good practises in the guise of SEO, then I guess that's good, but we cringe at the thought of having to label it like that to get acceptance.

ajdecon 16y ago

Sometimes a term becomes so strongly associated with unethical behavior that it can't be used in a more positive context. I think this is true for "SEO". In theory there should be no cognitive bias against the idea of optimizing a site design to make it easily searchable; but historically this term is associated with shady practices. One of your comments states that you want to make "SEO" a brand people respect. I don't think this is going to happen in the short term, when the experienced engineers you want to hire remember cursing the unethical behavior of other SEO practitioners.

danielsim 16y ago

Very interesting question. We founded Plug in SEO a year ago and at the time came up against lots of anti-SEO prejudice. The scene has definately changed, at least here in the UK. The prejudge has been replaced with robust questions about its benefit. As for recruitment, if your SEO solution is genuinely an arms race of outmanouvering search engines, as an engineer myself I'd have passed over the opportunity. Personally I relish solving problems but not reinventing the wheel or gaming search engines.