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It seems that most people here would like it very much if SEO died a horrible death as quickly as possible. Let me try and paint a (probably somewhat sketchy) p
by bengillies 14y ago
It seems that most people here would like it very much if SEO died a horrible death as quickly as possible. Let me try and paint a (probably somewhat sketchy) picture of why it should exist (I have nothing to do with SEO consulting btw):
1. You have a business.
2. Said business has a website.
3. Said website is bringing in no discernable revenue for your business.
4. Poking around for reasons, you discover that your website ranks really lowly on Google.
5. You have no idea why.
6. You pay an SEO consultant. They take a look at your web site, and your overall web presence, to try and find out what's going wrong.
7. They discover that your markup is terrible, the wrong things are enclosed in header tags, etc. Also, you have little to no visibility outside of your website.
8. They advise some sensible changes to your markup, and force you to start posting things on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
9. Your ranking improves. As does your revenue.
Which bit of that process is evil and wrong?
Of course, there will always be a shady side to SEO (people taking it too far, etc), but there's a valid reason reason it exists: many people simply do not know enough to get the basic components right. SEO consultants help them do that, and improve revenue as a result.
- cs02rm0 14y agoI think the general contention is that the process you describe is just using someone who's going to write sensible HTML not SEO. The shady side of actually modifying code not for easy-to-read, browser-efficiency, etc. is SEO.
- RBerenguel 14y agoI have to disagree. I consider part of my job to be some SEO (not my primary task and neither the most important, but I take care of it at my company) and its definitely the first part of what you sketch. And trying to clean all the second part stupid stuff someone else may have done before. I don't see it as a game against Google... I try to make our sites as useful for humans as possible, and hope Google agrees with a decent enough ranking so humans can visit it and enjoy the content. But when it doesn't, then the game is between me and the "other SEOs" who may not see the point of making something useful for readers, not machines.
- waxjar 14y agoWriting sensible HTML is optimising for machines. The Google algorithm runs on machines, so they'll like it and benefit from it. Browsers, screen-reader, future colleagues will also like it and benefit from it. Calling this search engine optimisation seems a bit weird, though it'll certainly help Google process your website properly. If you read the OP, his mean concern is the tiny subtle changes in the algorithm that drive him mad. He calls optimising for them SEO. It is considered shady and evil by some, myself included. (Ultimately it's about the content, not about who best reverse-engineered Google's algorithm.)