Fortune Favors The Bold

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

caterpillarcowboy:

mikehudack:

caterpillarcowboy:

soupsoup:

femmebot:

The One True Way to get a lot of traffic on the web [is] pretty simple, and I’m going to give it to you here, for free:

Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.

That’s it. Make something you believe in. Make it beautiful, confident, and real. Sweat every detail. If it’s not getting traffic, maybe it wasn’t good enough. Try again.

Then tell people about it. Start with your friends. Send them a personal note – not an automated blast from a spam cannon. Post it to your Twitter feed, email list, personal blog. (Don’t have those things? Start them.) Tell people who give a shit – not strangers. Tell them why it matters to you. Find the places where your community congregates online and participate. Connect with them like a person, not a corporation. Engage. Be real.

Then do it again. And again. You’ll build a reputation for doing good work, meaning what you say, and building trust.”

— Derek Powazek - Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

I don’t understand this obsession with marketing purity. First it was don’t send out press releases and now it’s don’t use SEO. It’s like marketing is somehow dirty because it’s only used to “make up for a bad product.”

Bullshit. Marketing is important. Even the best products need to be marketed. Google had marketing and PR departments. Say what you will about About.com, but it was a great business and it was simply SEO. SEO was the product.

Start-ups are hard enough without silly religious convictions.

While some people may be religious about it, as you say, I reblogged because I don’t believe you should pay an “expert” to help you with it. The basics of SEO are simple enough for anyone to learn, and they get you 80% there with minimal effort. Chasing the remaining 20% can take up time better spent improving your product.

As someone who’s been on “optimization” duty for companies small and large, I have this pretty-well-thought opinion about SEO:

A search engine returns results to its customers based on how relevant those results are to their query. The goal of an SEO effort should be to, within reason, make pages and sites appear to be relevant in all the ways IN WHICH THEY ARE ACTUALLY RELEVANT. Since search technology is pretty accurate nowadays, most passages of (semantically proper) text would already be self-sufficient in its “search optimization”. It’s dishonest for a web site to try to be relevant to queries in which it is not actually relevant.

But dishonesty has become standard practice.

Just the term “SEO” has a scummy connotation, linked somewhat strongly with both white-hat and black-hat consultants alike. Now, if a firm can come in and make your company appear in more search results in a legitimate way, that’s great. But in many cases, you have vendors who try to “juice” your results and who do things that’ll get you on the Google +60 list if you get caught. Worse, a lot of employees at big web-dev teams see “SEO consultants” doing what it is that they do, and think, “Oh, we could have done that, it just looks like a scummy bad thing to do”.

Note also that web documents have a really strong imperative to be listed in search engines, to which they are often very relevant for at least a narrow topic. (It was a waste to publish it if it has little relevancy) But what about web applications? What about something like, say, Gmail? You should only see Gmail when you search for “email” or “online email”. And that’s probably not a good growth strategy anyway. So: content or interactive applications that are not useful to common web queries should concentrate on forms of marketing other than SEO. You should not hijack search engines just to promote your product in irrelevant ways. And they’ll find out what your scheme is eventually, and demote you accordingly.

What most SEO vendors will tell you is the opposite of that. We can optimize you and get you listed anywhere; doesn’t matter who you are or what you do. Just pay us! So, really, screw them.