Derek-
Thanks for the insightful post. I have been looking into SEO to see if I really need to do it for my blog. I have been hesitant to pay anyone since I really don’t understand this stuff at all. This post clears it up for me and makes a lot of sense. I think I will continue to produce quality posts (I hope) and ignore all this SEO stuff.

Thanks again for the advice

Posted by Jarie Bolander on 13 October 2009 @ 12pm

Well the main problem here is that people don’t know this information. In my experience people hiring web designers probably barely even have the competency to open a web browser and get to this site, let alone understand what it says. There’s a major problem with the ratio of good developers to bad developers that makes explaining things to clients even more difficult.

Hell, even if you’re hired as a developer – there’s so much static bad information out there that when you tell people what’s right they’re ready to jump on you with “well, so and so told me this” and yes, you’d like to respond with “well, go hire them and fuck off” but in reality for many developers it’s not that simple. Sometimes you just need the client, and if you reject every bad client out there it just validates what they thought incorrectly to begin with and just perpetuates the entire bad section of the market.

Well anyway, without rattling off down another road, I guess my point is this: Yes, in the ideal world clients would be able to tell who knows what they’re doing and who to listen to – but in this clusterfuck of an industry it’s just not always that black and white.

Posted by awesomerobot on 13 October 2009 @ 12pm

Can I share an SEO horror story?

I work for a company (which shall remain nameless) whose primary income comes from selling advertising, both for a printed product and a series of websites.

Some time ago, someone at our corporate office decided we should also be in the business of selling SEO. Of course, our sales reps balked; they know advertising, not SEO. So a push went out to give them obscenely large bonuses for every SEO package they sold.

Fast forward a few weeks, and we had a few dozen customers who’d been sold expensive SEO packages — and nearly half of them don’t even have websites.

I’ve spent most of my adult life working in advertising and marketing, so I have a very flexible moral standard about what constitutes “evil” in marketing, but even I feel more than a little sick about this one.

Posted by Dingo Mulheny on 13 October 2009 @ 12pm

I wandered into the Search Engine Marketing conference in NYC several years back and was truly amazed at the amount of money being spent by SEO companies to market their services. The web designer/developer in me was saying, “WTF is this all about? This is ridiculous.” — because I knew that SEO was 80% common sense and 20% good content. The fact that hundreds upon hundreds of companies were each spending many tens of thousands of dollars to promote their services for what was basically a “gaming of the system” was truly astonishing.

Posted by Cameron Barrett on 13 October 2009 @ 12pm

Every person on Twitter who’s followed me and lists “SEO” or “social media marketing” in their bio gets an immediate block.

This is because they are not doing anything interesting with Twitter. They are following many thousands of people in the hopes of getting followed back so people can learn from their magical advice. They are wasting my time, my precious, can’t-get-it-back-by-finding-out-you’re-following-me-while-you-”follow”-twenty-thousand-other-people time.

For this, you are evil, because you are killing me, one second at a time.

Snark and write all you want, you self-proclaimed “gurus” and “social media students” and the like. Derek nailed your asses dead to rights.

Do something interesting.

Make something interesting.

MAKE SOMETHING WORTH MY TIME.

Posted by Adam Rakunas on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

The people who go around talking about “targeted terms” illustrate that they don’t get what Derek is talking about. People like Derek (and me) don’t HAVE “targeted terms”. We make things, publish information, share knowledge. We don’t ever think for a second about what search terms will match what we do. To us, your way of thinking is like trying to find a soul mate after deciding what their first and last name will be.

Posted by Eric Meyer on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

Still playing semantics (and not the web kind). “Good web development” INCLUDES a solid SEO strategy, which I will certainly agree isn’t rocket science and doesn’t involve more than a few simple things, many of which you write about, but that are still, for various reasons, completely ignored.

Your statement here:

“Good web development includes using proper formatting (like putting headlines in H tags) and understanding how the web works. It 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 would argue that making your pages more accessible for users isn’t just a side-effect of proper formatting. It’s one of the two MAIN effects, the other being ensuring your code is readable to another developer who may get asked to work on it. Why else does an ecommerce site exist if not to market a product to as many people as possible? When you’re in a field with many competitors who have all (including my employer) been “Make(ing) something great. Tell(ing people about it. Do(ing it again.” for many years, then how do you distinguish yourself amongst them? One tactic is to do everything you can to optimize your online presence in order to get the best possible search engine results. No need to try and game the system. That’s SEO.

For what it’s worth, I don’t sell SEO services, nor am I the SEO guy where I work. I’m the content guy who has worked very closely with the SEO guy and learned a lot about writing well-structured web content, which is far different than well-structured print content. Now, why is it different? For one, people read differently on the web than they do in print (the biggest difference being the reliance upon keywords to find what they’re looking for). For another, that structure matters as to how well a search engine will index your content.

That’s SEO.

Posted by JV on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

I appreciate this post more than your previous post about SEO charlatans.

Yes, I agree with your points, and I understand and share the frustration that businesses are conned into paying for SEO consulting. It’s not fair that these artless swindlers are getting rich while poisoning the web.

“If they’re not obvious to you, and you make websites, you need to get informed.”

Here’s where you should devote your energy. There are no doubt resources out there that summarize the *real* best practices of developing web sites that cooperate with search engines. What are these resources?

A great point comes from @awesomerobot — there’s a lot of misinformation, outdated advice, and plain harmful techniques that are out there. Without spending ten years developing experience by trial-and-error (and causing harm unintentionally), how is an up and coming web developer supposed to know the difference?

I suggest your next post on SEO should be “recommended reading,” with links to your picks for good tutorials, books, blogs, etc. that represent the state of the art best practices to develop web sites. Saying that these best practices are “obvious” is a cop-out.

You can be a mentor, not just a ranter.

Posted by Bill Karwin on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

Amen, Derek. A-fuckin’-men. I think the only non-intuitive SEO thing I’ve ever learned was that, if I’m looking for traffic, I needed to make my page/post titles more literal. People don’t search the web poetic page titles like “And so, what does all this really mean?” Other than that, SEO really is common sense.

That said, do SEO dudes even exist any more? I thought they’d all become Social Media Consultants.

Posted by Ariel on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

“We make things, publish information, share knowledge. We don’t ever think for a second about what search terms will match what we do.”

Look, you’re Eric Meyers, and I’ve learned TONS about CSS from reading your stuff. But your product is information, and so I guess the statement I quoted works for you. But if your product isn’t information, it’s something like health insurance or machine parts, then suddenly your statement means absolutely nothing. Say two new companies sell basically the same kinds of machine parts for about the same prices. One company has a website with all its content buried in Flash, the other has a nicely structured site that validates for every standard. Which site will perform better in a search? Remember, both companies are new so there’s no brand awareness that of course is the best SEO asset of all.

Posted by JV on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

Congratulations on quitting smoking! (or something)

As you say, it would be nice if the stack of us who put things on the web were more holistic…

Posted by Mike Papageorge on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

JV: I think what Derek and Eric are saying is that something else in addition to clean, well written code will make one of those sites tip while the other doesn’t. That something else is a clean and clear presentation of the product such that people who want it won’t think about going anywhere else for it.

I’m pretty sure that Zappos’ success has nothing to do with SEO, everything to do with user experience AFTER the site’s been found which leads to repeat users, links, high page rank and more new users through search. What tips it is not SEO, it’s the experience AFTER discovery.

What Derek is saying is, put energy into making something that’s so great it goes viral, like a well written post on why SEO is bunk.

Posted by Richard on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

Oh man, I wanted to comment on the ranty article but you closed the comments…

I’ve followed SEO out of curiosity – I’m a web developer (wish I was a web designer). I’ve followed the “ideas” of SEO for a long time, from the keywords, to the structure of HTML, to linking, to “google bombing” to “breaking google’s algorithm” etc. etc.

Great content beats bad markup (for example: http://www.seobook.com/source-code-validation-common-sense). However, that site has been around for awhile, has tons of track backs and is well known in the “seo industry.” And then there is this article – a great “moment of truth” that throws SEO up in people’s faces.

I heartily agree that SEO begins with development, and continues with great ideas/content/details. That’s the key.

I find it amusing people were upset over your post, talking about how it was “link-bait,” talking about SEO is bullshit, to how “you don’t get SEO” and “you don’t take your own advice” etc. etc. That is hilarious to me. Even more so the people that commented by linking to their blog, as if by writing on their own site somehow made it more pertinent than an honest reply *cough* Talk about link-baiting… (Will this be long enough for a blog post? Maybe…)

Let’s start at the beginning:

“1. The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.”
To people who work online, this is true. To a small business who wants to get online (and genuinely has a reason to be online, mind you) they won’t have a clue. They may hire their nephew who does an okay job getting an HTML page up because they’re learning, but it takes someone who has done development to take it up a notch from the basics. Enter the bad people who seek out suckers, vs. being approached to help, or most importantly VERIFYING what you don’t know, getting additional quotes… really, why doesn’t someone do a FREE webinar/seminar on “the basics: don’t get screwed when you first take your business online.”

“2. SEO is poisoning the web.”
I don’t *entirely* agree. What most people SELL as SEO is bad. Like you said (and I agree) new sites SEO start with the development (headers, structure, etc.). It continues on with GREAT content. But that’s at launch. It continues with marketing, usability, accessibility – which colors work better? (someone stated) which layout is generating more targeted traffic to the areas we want?

Is that SEO? Or marketing? Maybe a blend of both. Like the SEO link above showcased – when you’ve been around awhile, your markup may not matter as much (but then again, find me someone who TRULY understand Google’s algorithm secrets, and I’ll show you a liar)

“The One True Way”

Yeah, I agree. Do great, and great things will happen. I found this article not by google, but by twitter. I found you to be eloquent enough to get your point across and rile up the people who see their livelihood at stake as well as those who were intelligent enough to say “I’ve called what I do SEO, but it’s more than what you are saying it is.”

I relate the issue to SEO to the same one I face as a web developer. I do a LOT of front end coding. XHTML, W3C compliance, accessibility, MooTools, jQuery, Dojo (etc. etc. enter your tech buzzwords and “hot new tech” here). I’m called a web developer. I sit close to a guy who does ATG Architecture. Back end Java. Oracle Databases. Another guy? PHP and MySQL. Their titles? Web developer (okay, varying degrees, junior, senior, architect, but I digress).

I know someone who does SEO. That encompasses a lot more than “let’s validate your code and change your keywords.” It’s a marketing strategy. “What is bringing people to your site? What is the best design we can do to encourage interaction? What can we do to bring people back?” I know someone else that copies and pastes the same document over and over with the basic crap to every client and charges a premium. Both are called SEO Strategists.

As I reread what I’ve written (poorly) I see it really is about semantics and definitions. People that took offense to your writing really need to take a look at what they do, and if it’s really MORE than what your writing states. If not, they need to brush up their skill sets.

Great writing, great responses (and great references, Hunter S. Thompson? Fuck yeah).

Keep kicking ass.

-keif (omg! I didn’t link my site!)

Posted by keif on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

As an SEO (and a web developer as well), may I advise you to frequently verify your link boasting that you are the #3 result in Google?

As I’m certain every competent web developer knows, Google’s personalization algorithms may show you as either greater or less than 3rd in some cases depending on which part of the country (or even the world in some cases) your request is coming from.

Seriously though-while SEO and web development are frequently cross functional, both functions have enough of a body of knowledge that it’s kind of a simplification to say that either can be competently addressed by one position. Yes, one with good skills can do a competent job at the other, but can they specialize in such a manner as to do an excellent job?

While I know some of the finer points of web development, of course I would defer to someone who concentrated on staying up on the latest trends in the field. I wonder why that doesn’t make sense to you when it comes to SEO?

Posted by An SEO on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

Yes, I checked my links in Google while logged out, so no personalization. I’m not counting the indented sub-results or the Google in-site promotions. Let’s stop playing “who’s better at SEO” because, clearly, I have no interest in winning that game.

Posted by Derek Powazek on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

“But I use SEO for good. Then you’re called a Web Developer”.

Well, you can use words and call them different things, but that doesn’t actually make them different things. Your first post was about spammers, not about SEOs. And web development covers only a subset of the important aspects of search (core search issues exist for marketing, product development, PR, online support, and other areas of business as well).

Businesses operating online need to understand that environment, which includes how users behave online, how they find information/products, and yes, how to make sure their potential customers can find them in Google.

Search data can provide information about what customers are most interested in and how they search for things, which can help companies better engage with customers and ensure they’re providing exactly what customers need.

From a web development perspective, developers are generally tasked with making the site functional. Understanding infrastructure issues that impact a search engine’s ability to crawl the site and extract content from it is not always a core skillset of the developer.

Yes, I agree that it should be core to development. Just as using search data to understand customers should be part of marketing and product development. But saying those components are either “obvious” or “scams” is really glossing over some very important and sometimes complicated aspects of operating online.

Countless people have asked me to help them figure out why they lost all of their customers when they changed domains or URL structure, desperate because they were going to have to lay off all of their employees. Asked me to help with their struggle to figure out why their CMS or ecommerce platform wasn’t indexed in search engines. Not realized that their host had added a robots.txt file to their server blocking Google to reduce bandwidth and not known enough to even look for that.

And Eric, if you’re publishing information with the intent of sharing knowledge, perhaps you *should* care about what your potential audience is searching for so they can actually find you. 92% of those online use search engines to look for information. Take the National Institutes of Health. Real people are looking for information on rheumatoid arthritis and NIH has valuable information on that topic. But people are searching for “natural” treatments and NIH has pages on “alternative” treatments. All of that great content that our tax dollars pay to be professionally vetted is never being seen by most people who are looking for it. But without (free) search data or expensive focus groups and other types of market research, NIH has no way knowing that they’re not speaking in the language of their customer.

(No, I’m not an SEO but I did create Google webmaster central, which Derek suggests everyone read.)

I wrote about this a year and a half ago if anyone’s interested:
http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/seo-is-the-worst-thing-ever-invented/

Posted by Vanessa Fox on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

Thank you.

There are so many scammers and charlatans online that are just in it to take people’s money. These scammers and charlatans give real coders and real tech guys a bad name.

There’s a department store here in the northeast USA whose slogan is “An educated consumer is our best customer.” I fully and firmly believe that to be the case for web workers as well.

What your previous post did was bring a little education to our consumers. Rock on.

Charlotte

ps – Hunter S. Thompson. Amen.

Posted by Charlotte on 13 October 2009 @ 1pm

Very few people have the ability to make something ‘great’. Yes, if you have a product or service that is great, you probably don’t need much in the way of SEO. But in reality, most small business owners are selling vanilla ice cream in a world full of Breyers, Hood, Carvel, Edy’s, Ben & Jerrys, etc.

I wonder if you HAD hired a professional, would it have taken us all a decade to find you?

Do you think everybody can simply sit down and write a great blog post or article? As a programmer/DB/web developer/SEO for 20 years (who can’t design worth a lick), the notion that a designer is simply going to pick up an HTML 101 book and create a ‘great’ website… is just silly.

Anyway, you got a lot of peoples attention (and isn’t that really the most important thing?), you are a ‘great’ marketer and salesman.

Posted by Gus Salvetti on 13 October 2009 @ 2pm

“I wonder if you HAD hired a professional, would it have taken us all a decade to find you?”
Dude, I am a professional. And I don’t care if you find me. This is a personal site.

“Do you think everybody can simply sit down and write a great blog post or article?”
No, but if you can’t, you should hire someone who can (instead of hiring a SEO to promote bad content).

“you are a ‘great’ marketer and salesman.”
Oh “thanks”.

Posted by Derek Powazek on 13 October 2009 @ 2pm

You’re picking some low-hanging fruit in your responses. Perhaps addressing some of Vanessa’s points would be interesting.

Posted by JV on 13 October 2009 @ 2pm

JV: I’m not addressing Vanessa’s points because, fundamentally, we agree. We’re just using different terms.

Posted by Derek Powazek on 13 October 2009 @ 2pm

The original post and this are both excellent. I’ve been using the term SEO, with great reluctance, for PART of what I do. The ideas are simply web design/development best practices, but I’m not sure what else to call it.

This prompted me to write a blog entry of my own on the topic, including the full text of SEO-related best practices that I include for free in every proposal I write: http://blog.room34.com/archives/3783

Posted by room34 on 13 October 2009 @ 2pm

While I share most of the sentiments and statements on both of the posts, and agree that great content is always better than seo-ing the SHIT out of your site, there is reason to use SEO for things like online stores.

The reason you use an seo person (which I’ve held the title of in the past) is to teach you other techniques outside of what’s in Google’s SEO Best Practices document that they publicly release on their blog.

When you’re working with a store that has limited pages and doesn’t have the ability to deliver fresh content that’s linkable (like a blog) it’s a bit harder to get linkbacks. (Like a small e-commerce store for instance)

You’ve stirred quite the controversy over SEO and have therefore gotten lots of chatter and linkbacks therefore getting yourself into result #9 for Google–but how is Joe’s Auto Parts superstore ever going to sell a power steering fluid pump online when no one would ever link to it for any reason?

Why would anyone link to and talk about a power steering fluid pump product page?

Some seo specialists can help people who have very limited knowledge of how to sell online. They can help them show up in search results by catering to certain keywords that there isn’t competition for by ensuring their websites code uses those less targeted keywords in the proper places and that they have an XML sitemap (which Joe’s auto parts knows nothing about) and has as many inbound links as possible.

I’m willing to bet most web developers wouldn’t have the time to do in depth analysis of what keywords fit a website’s products best, as well as have low competition for search, and yet have high search volumes while they’re busy learning jquery, css, html, php, mysql, or ruby, asp dot net, django etc. etc. etc.

Great post, I like it, but there will always be room for SEO people whether you like it or not–don’t discount the entire industry because you’ve gotten spammed or emailed about “Getting on the first page of google!” a few times.

I’ve had plenty of mommy bloggers piss me off in the past–but I’m not discounting bloggers altogether because of it.

Posted by tim on 13 October 2009 @ 2pm

I think I understand where you’re coming from. You make some great points; I think we agree, but I probably word things a bit differently. For a LONG time I’ve had the philosophy that “a site should be built with SEO in mind” which is simply another way to say “make it the RIGHT way from the get-go”. Or something like that.

Indeed, it frustrates me when I work with designers who have no clue how to actually make a web page out of their design. Or when I have to argue (educate?) “web people” about the correct use of tags and attributes. It’s not at all uncommon, the plain ignorance about coding. For this reason, the job of “SEO” isn’t totally invalid. But your points simply ask the question, “why do we need an industry to clean up bad development practices?” – which we shouldn’t.

However, the reality is that many people don’t know how to do things the right way, and when one of us who does comes along and says, “lookit, you need to put yer H1 here and take those font tags out here and what the hell are all these alt tags blank for” we are called SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZERS. Like we do magic or something.

To tell you the truth, I was “doing SEO” before I even knew what SEO was. I built sites in much the same way then as I do now, and I got much of my knowledge from the “web standards gurus” as opposed to the “SEO gurus” (guys like Zeldman, and sites like A List Apart).

So, I wish you wouldn’t be so rough on the people who are called SEOs, just because we’re perhaps mis-labeled. But people understand what an SEO does, whereas they might not care if I tell them, “I will structure your code in a way that is standards-compliant and blah blah blah…” even though that’s basically what I end up doing when I magically “perform SEO” anyway.

Posted by Shawn Plep on 13 October 2009 @ 2pm

I appreciate the improvements and clarifications you have made to your rant, but the facts of the real world remain: until the relevancy and ranking of my web pages stops being determined by robots, I will tailor my web pages to be robot friendly. Fortunately, the robots are behaving more and more like genuine readers, so it’s getting to be less of an exercise in abstraction to do so.

Regardless,
A) 80% of businesses in the US employ fewer than 20 people – they will not hire specialists for every individual aspect of their web site construction if they can possibly avoid it. Jobs generally go to the lowest bidder.

B) Most Search Engine manipulation techniques that do not add to the experience of the reader remain evil.

C) SEO as a profession encompasses a great deal of knowledge and expertise in both retail marketing and web page construction. Yes a good web designer should be familiar with all, but there are very few who have the time or inclination to master them all. You’re passing the buck to a copywriter, when I’ll wager your favorite copywriters to work with have a working knowledge of what you do to support the search engines. These are the same people doing the same job. One is during construction, the other is after construction.

SEO as a service is no more illegitimate than hiring an interior designer, a decorator, a plumber, a cabinetmaker or a housekeeper. All are narrowly specialized professions hired for the customer’s convenience.

Please, stop calling the crooks and scam artists by the same title. They do not do the same job.

Posted by MonkeyT on 13 October 2009 @ 3pm

An SEO is a specialist.

It’s no different to someone who specializes in HTML and CSS, or in JQuery or in Wordpress installations.

Someone who does one thing all day long will get better at it that someone for whom it’s just one aspect of their role.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a specialist.

And there’s also nothing wrong with being a generalist.

It’s no more wrong to specialize in coding up other people’s designs than it is to SEO other people’s content.

Now, it IS wrong to code other people’s sites using tables with a “Best Viewed in IE 5.5 at 800×600″ message at the bottom.

But that’s just a bad HTML coder.

Likewise, it is wrong to use so-called black hat techniques to SEO a website.

But’s that’s just a bad SEO.

But it’s not wrong to go over an existing site and say:

* Make the title tag X
* Make the H1 tag Y
* Why not call the page “Cornwall’s favourite B&B” rather than “Welcome to Hogwarts”.

It’s all well and good saying that any good web designer or developer should know this .. but it’s not actually true that most competent web developers DO know this.

So, until either:

- Web developers start to learn more about SEO *en masse* or
- Search stops being relevant

Then SEO will continue to exist. And that’s not evil.

Re: a few of your points…

>> “Do you think everybody can simply sit down and write a great blog post or article?”

> No, but if you can’t, you should hire someone who can (instead of hiring a SEO to promote bad content).

That *is* what an SEO should do. Write good content or help you write it.

Any SEO that tries to promote bad content rather than simply rewriting it so that it’s good is a moron and won’t have much success.

Again, you’re confusing crap SEO with SEO in general.

There are still plenty of people coding with tables in Dreamweaver. Doesn’t mean HTML is fundamentally bad. This is no different.

> “But I use SEO for good. Then you’re called a Web Developer”.

Really?

Cos a minute ago you were saying all that mattered was good content. Make your mind up.

Since when is it a web developer’s job to create good content?

That’s the job of a copy writer.

And that’s what most SEOs are .. copy writers .. for the most part.

A lot of the work I do, when I’m doing SEO, is to rewrite other people’s badly-written content .. and part of that includes thinking about keywords to place in strategic places. But it also includes just generally writing better copy which is more engaging an with fewer mistakes.

Occasionally, I have to totally recode a site for SEO. However, if I do, it’s because the site was rubbish in the first place.

Generally, what I do is take reasonably well-coded, semantic CSS sites and re-write the content of H1 tags, titles, links and body copy.

A lot of what I do is also basic accessibility.

Changing a link from “Click here” to “More info about Bananas” helps the site do better in Google. It’s *also* better for someone with a screen reader.

> SEO SPECIALISTS: If all you do is SEO, you need to expand.

Few SEOs I know just do SEO. Most do web design and development, or copy writing, as well.

However, they’re better than the average web designer at getting content up in Google and clients come to them because of that.

The bottom line is this..

SEO may common sense.

But it’s not common practice.

ALL of my SEO clients (and that’s about 20% of my turnover, for what it’s worth) have come to me because they had a website that was done by someone else and wasn’t getting traffic or results.

Don’t blame me for that. Blame the person who did the original site.

It might surprise you, but companies don’t turn to SEOs because when they’re selling £1,000,000 a minute through their websites.

They turn to SEOs when their web designer or developer has done a site, but it’s not performing.

Sometimes, the web designer in question was rubbish. But more often than not, they’re not bad. The design is good, it’s reasonably well coded. They just don’t know those “common sense” things that an SEO might – like not using “Norbert International” as the title tag on every page in their site, when they’re hoping to rank for “Banana Importer”.

If you want to put SEOs out of business, don’t slate them. Educate web designers.

When the majority of web designers and content creators are doing their jobs right, there will be no need and no market for SEO.

Until then, SEOs will sleep easy at night.

>> SEO is needed because of bad web design.
> Wouldn’t it be better to make competent websites in the first place?

And wouldn’t it be better if nobody committed crimes. Then we wouldn’t need police.
And wouldn’t it be better if people didn’t get ill. Then we wouldn’t need hospitals.

Sure, it would be better.

But…

a) It’s not the SEO industry’s fault if web designers are crap, is it?

b) You have to deal with reality. And the reality is most web designers DON’T know about the “common sense” things you mention.

And to be frank, why should they.

Any web designer who’s still using tables (still a lot of them out there) is rubbish.

But as long as they’re using good clean HTML / CSS then it’s really not the web designer’s job to write copy.

That’s someone else’s job. Someone who writes copy. Someone like an SEO.

Posted by Richard Quick on 13 October 2009 @ 3pm

Before anyone points it out…

“But it also includes just generally writing better copy which is more engaging an with fewer mistakes.”

I do love irony!

;o)

Posted by Richard Quick on 13 October 2009 @ 3pm

Good post.

I’m no web developer but my personal blog dropped out of google for no apparent reason earlier this year. Anyway, a bit of research and some time spent reading soon sorted that.

The SEO ads all over the web do my head in.

Posted by Andy on 13 October 2009 @ 3pm

Nothing tops making great content and telling people about it. That I completely agree with. I also agree there are a lot of shams out there. I also agree that SEO should be part of any competent web professional’s toolbox.

What I don’t agree with is the idea that an SEO industry is unnecessary.

Building websites is a complex task, even for seasoned professionals. The bigger the website, the more complex it becomes. At some point you are no longer making a web site but a web application. This requires specialists and its unreasonable to assume that even the most competent web developer will have all the skills necessary to pull it off.

We have programmers, Javascript specialists, Accessibility Specialists, copywriters, ad managers, and a number of other things that could all be lumped under “competent web developer.”

But the truth is that even the best general web developer or even firm usually doesn’t perform at the level of specialists, that’s why they are specialists and usually the honest ones are worth the money *if they are needed*.

The main challenge of SEO is that most people don’t really need it but are sold on the concept that they do. This creates an unhealthy priority on where money gets placed and what needs fixing first.

Also, to answer your FAQ since I’m somewhat defending SEOs here, I do not sell SEO for a living, I’ve never purchased SEO services, I typically did not recommend SEO specialists to clients (but provided SEO as part of my services), I’m no way related to or benefit from defending SEOs, and I am a competent web professional who has been in this business since 1996.

In my experience as such, I’ve seen the legit need for SEO grow and I’ve met SEO specialists who are very much worth the money for those who need it. The good ones solve real problems for real business with real ROI as a result. The bad ones, as you pointed out, can destroy a business by draining its funds and ruining its priorities.

I empathize with your anger, agree with your conclusion on the number one best practice, but respectfully disagree on the need for SEO services to exist separate from web developers. There is an appropriate place for them.

After all, the same argument can be made about Accessibility. It should definitely be part of a competent web developers toolkit but I think you’d probably agree that there is still a need for Joe Clark.

Posted by Leslie on 13 October 2009 @ 4pm

I think your perspective is 100% correct, but I think your argument is semantic. You say that “good” SEO is nothing more than smart web development. Then, once you’ve cleared all the “smart web developers” out the way, you lay waste to “SEOs.” But in my opinion – and in the opinion of Google’s Matt Cutts – the practices you (rightly) lambaste are defined as spam (not SEO).

I think that in all fairness, some SEOs are exactly as you describe. Of course, some “journalists” are nothing more than self-promoting agitators with a keyboard. I would say that this post isn’t self-promoting agitation, but judging by the comments from regular readers in your last post, a case could be made.

Posted by Jason Lancaster on 13 October 2009 @ 4pm

Really enjoyed the 2 posts on SEO. As a small web design business we always try to do things right ie using H1s,H2s correctly. When we first started up we made no mention of this to our customers as we just figured it was par for the course. But with the amount of SEO companies that contact our customers we find ourselves telling our customers they’re sites are naturally optimized. (Saying they’re built right just doesn’t seem to do it for them and they felt like they were missing out on something)

Posted by Clayton on 13 October 2009 @ 4pm

Hello, I’m new here.

Can all you folks who think you are “white hat SEO” please consider renaming yourselves to “Searchability Optimizers” instead? After all, if you’re not actually participating in search engine gaming, you’re not actually “Search Engine Optimizers” are you?

So now that you’ve renamed yourselves “Searchability Optimizers”, you already have the purpose of your role defined in your title: helping your customers make their sites more accessible to people searching for information about X.

To make the information more accessible, you need to have a web site that is fairly information-light per page. That is, each web page is like a paragraph of an essay: it talks to one point (and only one point) at a time. Thus you are pretty much encouraging good web design.

So really, you’re “web site designers”, not “searchability optimizers”, since “searchability” is a complete subset of “good web design”.

But then, being marketing types you need to differentiate yourself from “bad” web designers, so perhaps “Searchability Experts” is more fitting. You can hire yourself out to fix the mistakes the bad web “designers” (ie: “web adhoc-ers”) made with the first version of a site.

Since your focus is on making the customer’s site more visible and accessible (and usable), emphasise that aspect and call yourselves “Searchability Optimizers” or “Web site architects” or “Discoverability Experts”. “Search ENGINE Optimization” might be a technical role at Google, but if you’re hiring yourself out to non-search-engine companies, what you’re actually suggesting you do through use of that title is “Search Engine Gaming.”

Yes, it’s a semantic argument. Don’t call yourself something you’re not. If you’re not gaming search engines, you’re not an SEO.

Thankyou Derek for bringing this discussion up!

Posted by Alex on 13 October 2009 @ 5pm

Back when I freelanced, I told clients interested in SEO, that if their intent was to game the system, Google had $154 billion saying “I don’t think so”.

Google’s entire job is to make “SEO Experts” fail and deliver the results you want, not the results some “SEO Expert” wants.

Posted by Gordon Brander on 13 October 2009 @ 5pm

Derek,
As someone who does some SEO work for clients, I almost totally agree with your article here. I spend most of my time with clients explaining what SEO isn’t. I normally start any conversation with “If someone guarantees you a result in SEO, hang up the phone.”

My experience is that most people don’t want to spend 10 years building content. Period. So, in many cases, I help them refine their existing content and point them to places where like minded people hang out and encourage them to engage in conversations.

It’s tough enough for me to battle the SEO garbage that’s out there; I don’t want to pick a fight with what I call myself. I’m going to stick with “SEO something or other”, but I think I’ll send links to your articles to anyone I work for to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Thanks for the great work here

Posted by Eric H. Doss on 13 October 2009 @ 5pm

I was going to let it die, but I had to come back because your response so brilliantly illustrated what I was saying.

Personalization (today) does not require you to be logged in. The majority of the results for most Google searches today are geotargeted and personalized based on your location, your recent search history and other related factors, whether your are logged in or not.

Test this one out for yourself-do a search in one city (while logged out) and ask a friend of yours from another one to do the same search. Share your screen shots and see what they look like-in a lot of cases, they will look nothing alike.

How do I know tha-I’m an SEO and it’s my job to know how the search engines work today. It’s a web developer’s job to know how many pixels he can play with in a layout. Can I do his job-sure, but since I only spend a part of my time doing that type of work, he can absolutely kick my backside up and down the block doing it (since he does it all the time). The same is true with the roles reversed.

Without question, you are correct-great content will always find a home in the search engines as long as someone gives the spiders the inkling of a path to find it. That said, it’s a little easier said than done to do that (give the spiders an inkling of a path to find content) and yes, they do keep changing the rules to trip up those who are trying to inform them through nefarious means.

For those of us who are instead trying to help legitimately promote our great content, it’s clear that the job does have a art and a science to it’s practice.

All in all, I might tend to agree with your premise-good content will rule-I guess I might tend to disagree with your conclusion based on that premise-if you build it, they won’t ALWAYS come. Sometimes, regardless of how great the mousetrap is, you have to put a sign out to your door.

Posted by An SEO on 13 October 2009 @ 6pm

Derek -

I’ve never been a smoker (hence I can’t quit) but I’m still pissy as hell about these SEO asshats.

Posted by Dave Simon on 13 October 2009 @ 6pm

Unfortunately most web designers dont have a clue about proper structure and basic SEO. If they did then this ludicrous industry would not exist.

Lucky us at Time Out because we do know SEO and it allows us to get ahead.

I am soooo sick of writers who adapt their copy specifically for SEO and end up writing like children.

Posted by Julian Peterson on 13 October 2009 @ 6pm

Both post are great and cover something I’ve been trying to get clients to understand for awhile now. You start with good content, wrap it up in good markup and you don’t even need to high an outside “specialist” to get you better ranking.

A recent client of mine requested that I find someone to help with SEO, specifically loading pages with keywords. I recommended against it, based on a recent video of Matt Cutts discussing how keywords aren’t as important for their search algorithm mainly because of black-hat SEO practices. Instead, I offered to rework and improve the code, work with them on better copywriting and delve online tools such as Google’s Webmaster’s Tools to improve searchability and their ranking. I’ve also suggested exploring more options with social media, getting more people to talk about their product.

It may take some time to see some of the improvements, but along the way I’ve educated them and improved my knowledge by adding more to my skillset and what I can offer to future clients.

Posted by Scott Orchard on 13 October 2009 @ 7pm

I’ve developed a website for a small company for the last seven years. It’s my full time job. SEO as such has never entered my workflow. Yet we’re always in the front page of Google for various permutations on what we do. Now, why is this?

Mostly it’s lots of great content organized as intelligently as I can manage. We do pretty well for ourselves, too.

Derek, you’ve obviously ruffled some feathers on the SEO crowd here, but I’m in agreement with you. While I’m sure SEO professionals are wonderful people to have at parties and great parents, SEO practices at large (spamming) are poisoning the web.

Good development technique and SEO aren’t the same thing. People who make their living specializing in increasing one’s Google ranking aren’t likely to appreciate the semantic difference. Too much invested in the word when you make it your career.

Thanks for the post. Sent here from daringfireball.

Posted by Kit on 13 October 2009 @ 7pm

I love that you are so passionate about this.

That said, I still whole-heartedly disagree with your positioning of this and find it very short-sighted. The ‘obvious’ argument again. Those typically in charge of websites don’t understand web semantics. In my experience, good SEO is just understanding semantics and how they come into play in structuring the hierarchy of a site. Why not have specialists in this field? Much of the time the people coding the website are application developers and can tell you all about finding memory leaks and optimizing code to the point of squeezing every last drop of performance out of the site. It’s much easier in that case to have a specialist that understands semantic structuring of *content*.

I’m not an SEO specialist nor am I particularly fond of the industry. I even agree with your reasoning from a purely idealistic standpoint. That said, we don’t live in an idealistic world, do we?

Posted by Chuck Burt on 13 October 2009 @ 8pm

Yes, this is only what I’ve been saying for years.

I work as a freelancer online, too, in writing, graphics design, and programming. Writing for websites is my main income. And if I had a dollar for every potential client I dropped as soon as the said the dreaded three-letter acronym, I could retire by now.

Posted by Penguin Pete on 13 October 2009 @ 8pm

Bottom line is you can’t game the search engines anymore. SEO specialists sell snake oil. If they were any good at it, they would be making millions SEOing the hell out of their own sites and making tons of money from ads. The FACT is they don’t because they can’t. There are suckers born every minute and the SEO specialists know that.

Posted by tom on 13 October 2009 @ 8pm

The interest in SEO is simple

An awful lot of companies I know, and have worked at, don’t actually really look to create ‘customer value’ or believe that in committing to ‘customer value’ that they will succeed.

Customers are people you try and get money out of. Oh, and you provide them with ’service’

SEO is just a box to tick.

Posted by S. on 13 October 2009 @ 9pm

There will always be a thousand companies in every city “who do web design” or make websites. Most of them will be based out of India, but have an office in your town, they recently started to use divs instead of tables, and have a big link on the home page so you can “view their flash websites too”. They also probably sell SEO, and they probably have a ton of clients. They will continually produce products lacking sustainability, class, and taste.

Derek works on two client projects. Probably projects he cares a lot about. I think that is the point. There are web developers out there who actually care a lot about the projects they work on, and there are companies who “do websites” and “SEO”, and make invalid websites in return for a paid invoice only. There are way more of the latter.

I think part of the problem we are bombarded with so much crappy content on the web:

People like Derek are hard to find. They are picking and choosing projects they care about, or there just aren’t enough of them period. I can count five people (maybe four) in my city (I live in a metropolitan area with population of close 4 million) that design, code websites, and know the importance of writing good content, and I personally know them. There isn’t enough good product on the web, because there aren’t enough good developers. If there is a good site, I know who did it!.

Those I know of who are producing great content on the web, moving the industry forward in an intelligent and ethical manner that is great for users; are all passionate about web development as a whole, not just one little sliver of it.

There is something to be said about that. I think this article sums it up.

Pretty awesome article. I’m also glad that I came across room34’s post as well, super good info: http://blog.room34.com/archives/3783

Posted by Tony Krol on 13 October 2009 @ 10pm

I think its unfair to tar all SEO professionals with the same brush, whatever industry you are in there are good and bad service providers. Also your employing someone to do what you dont know how to do yourself or have the time to do. For example I know nothing about fitting a new shower, so I have 2 choices either learn how to do it or pay someone else to.

Not all web developers etc do know about SEO, yes I agree it would be better if web design/developers etc did know it and to provide customers with a better all round package is very beneficial, but not everyone is interested in doing that. I prefer coding sites rather than being bored number crunching data from AdWords.

Posted by Logan on 14 October 2009 @ 12am

It’s not SEO as such that’s the problem to me, more the misleading selling techniques. Derek’s post inspired a rant in me last night about how some SEO consultants pitch in a misleading manner. If you’re interested, and it’s OK with Derek, please look here: http://bit.ly/wKWAj.

Posted by Steve Noble on 14 October 2009 @ 12am

Thank you for the excellent posts on SEO! People have often asked me why my websites turned up high in Google results. I’m a developer who has never done anything SEO specific, but always used good web standards. That really did the trick.

Posted by Martijn Lafeber on 14 October 2009 @ 1am

I think this was fun and informative. Amusing to see all those vested interests go ape-shit.

Posted by Vincent Eaton on 14 October 2009 @ 1am

I am a fully trained marketer working for a large international business within the UK. As part of my job I look after managing all aspects of the marketing department including SEO. When I started the company their website was already built and when speaking to the developers they had no clue in how to optimise. Yes further research should have been done by my predecessor, however back then SEO was not booming like it is now. Essentially the site is built well but needed help in improving it to take it one step further. I have a strong knowledge of SEO but due to my task list no time to complete the work. I hire a respected SEO company to look after this side of the business and since doing so we have seen nothing but growth. A comment made higher up in the article states

Either;

- Developers have to improve their understanding of SEO
- or SEO have to start working on web development

Realistically this is not going to happen as both of these industries are ever changing (Algorithm updates, No Follow, page rank sculpting), to be an *expert / Professional* I feel you must focus on one area as the skill set is huge.

Posted by G on 14 October 2009 @ 1am

You rank third for “Derek”? Not where I am. You should do more research into SEO. It really doesn’t work the way you think anymore. You have a rather outdated perspective of what SEO entails and reports on. (not rankings)

SEO now encompasses all aspects digital media as well as offline media. Measurement is important, not just traffic and indexation but ROI and brand reputation management. I am rambling though.

You Sir, have hurt my feelings.

If you are ever in London look me up and we will have a healthy debate over coffee.

Posted by Monique on 14 October 2009 @ 1am

All legitimate aspects of SEO should have been covered by your Web developer and your content writer.

Don’t obtain SEO consultancy, obtain a Web developer with enough experience, and employ content writers that can write compelling content.

The article and its following FAQ are spot on. Build good, compelling sites that people want to read… then people will come.

Posted by Guy on 14 October 2009 @ 2am

Your issue is with bad web development rather than good SEO. In my experience, bad web development is far more common.

Posted by yeba on 14 October 2009 @ 2am

I thought your first article was great . . .but then I saw this one witch is even better. I totally agree.
Great article(s). Brilliant point of view. Congrats

Posted by jokr on 14 October 2009 @ 2am

Derek – my comments from yesterday were too long to put here and I want you to see them and respond to them. See http://www.aboutonlinematters.com/2009/10/why-search-engine-optimization-matters/.

Pardon if it is a bit “rambly” and a bit dense – I only have so much time to write and I do my best in those constraints.

Posted by Arthur Coleman on 14 October 2009 @ 5am

Derek, great couple of posts on SEO, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I agree with you totally that many/most SEO shops are scammers, or at least pretty close. And I agree with you totally that content should be for “optimized” your audience, not for Google.

That said, many of the small businesses I consult with know next to nothing about Google except, as you say, it’s important for them to rank high in search engine results. In these cases, I do charge for providing advice.

For them, the advice is “Stay away from SEO companies who make wild promises,” and “You can do the easy stuff yourself.” The value-add I provide is to help businesses connect.

By building their natural communities, the Google stuff (links, etc.) happens as a side-effect. And at the same time, they’re building brand recognition and customer loyalty. So I think that SEO companies will wither on the vine.

Social media approaches are more intuitive, cheaper and more emotionally rewarding. As businesses gravitate toward social media they will see they get the results an SEO program would provide, but without having to supplicate to the “dark side”!

Posted by Roger Harris on 14 October 2009 @ 5am

These recent posts have been interesting reads, but nowhere do you mention “search behavior” or a similar topic. That seems like where a *real* SEO puts most of their time…

Are you suggesting that it is Google’s responsibility to correct more than just misspellings?

Posted by Steve on 14 October 2009 @ 5am

Some centuries ago people paid much to persons foretelling the future. Most agreed this would work.

Some decades ago people paid much for specialists doing arteriotomies. Most agreed this would work.

Now we have SEO.

Posted by Peter on 14 October 2009 @ 6am

Derek – I’ve been following your blog for a while on google reader, so hadn’t noticed that the last post got out so much (though I shared it too, of course!)

I’m glad it did. This has been bugging me a lot lately and I feel like I’m constantly telling photographers to drop the flash, stop using imagemaps only, either learn a little html and higher codes or get someone who does. Or just get wordpress. It’s so versatile, it could easily be used to make a website, plus there are a million free seo twiddlers available for free for the platform.

Posted by Ian Aleksander Adams on 14 October 2009 @ 6am

Derek, thanks to your advice, I will never make (or sell) a Spicy Egg Omelet ever again. Though they were rather delicious.

Just thought I’d inject a little “har-dee-har-har” for you. Free of charge.

Posted by Anton on 14 October 2009 @ 8am

Just a quick comment to point out that in your last column you said that Google updates the index algorithm monthly if not more. In a recent video explaining why Google cannot notify everyone when the search algorithm is updated, Matt Cutts confirmed that Google updated the algorithm 400 times last year alone.

Posted by Mike on 14 October 2009 @ 9am

While I agree with you that most SEO are scams and they have definitely brought a bad name to the SEO sector in general, there is certain thing on which I can not share the same views as you. And no, I am not a SEO guy, I am just a simple blogger.

“But I use SEO for good.
Then you’re called a Web Developer.”

Good. But there’s something called specialization. In Web Development is vast enough to include many specialization. Just like a web database guy and a script coder though both part of be development can be identified as two separate specialist , the person responsible for making sure that the website is well formatted for the search engines to discover it easily can be called a search engine optimization guy. I see no wrong there. Even google calls them like that. But you seem to have a hatred of the SEO word itself.

Posted by Jay D on 14 October 2009 @ 10am

Derek, you’re hilarious. This is awesome and I love seeing all the “SEO” people rant and get all tight collared. I’ve learned how to do things right… and that’s why my sites rank well. I write clean code and encourage things like twitter, youtube, flickr to reach more users. I recently had a so called “SEO marketing guy” come to me and say I’ve got this client that needs a new site, and I have seen your work, it looks good, clean html, good titles but I don’t know how you rank so well? You could use a lot of improvement in your techniques. I was like, err what? You dip shit my sites are all on page one for main search terms so wtf are you talking about anyway? I think you said it best, “Hire a good web developer/designer right from the start” and your site will build ranking. For the people that are ranting about they can’t find one a good developer, or for the people that make their own sites with blog software and don’t know a thing about get ranked well and need an “SEO” guy… Are you kidding me? Didn’t you hear what Derek said? This shit is plain and simple. A 8 year old could learn how to do it properly. Clean html and good content, is that so hard to do? Do research cause it’s not F*$King rocket science! You think I’m writing this so I get a link back? I didn’t include my url, just wrote this cause I’m sick of the same thing Derek is.

Posted by Darren on 14 October 2009 @ 10am

As an oldschooler just like you, I’ve had my share of pain and suffering from clients demanding “Top SEO placement” even if they are just parroting the same claims as thousands of others on the web (Anyone who’s ever worked for the real estate or tourism business will know what I mean). Pretending to game Google, aka “black hat SEO” is a very poor short-term strategy that will ultimately backfire on whoever dares to it. If you’re not providing real value on your site and content that make people WANT to refer and talk about, it won’t be long before you realize all those tries to deceptively lure visitors into your site would ultimately have been better spent creating quality content that will create loyalty, word of mouth and real, interested visitors in return time after time.

To be fair, I know a friend who does SEO and is very aware of the bad reputation his field has. And he’s not promising “top placement” on Google either. He’s one of the few do-gooders in that business, for sure.

Posted by Beto on 14 October 2009 @ 10am

S.E.O. – Stupidify Everyone Online

Great post. Great thoughts. Great concerns. Great Scott!

I agree – just do it right. Results from ‘right’ are awesomeness and far reaching (big time investments, too).

I wanted to address the linkbait statement someone had made. It is just a reverse engineered term to describe what only excellence can achieve when aligned with sheer luck and is non-duplicatable unless you find a magic button.

Posted by @iq4sale on 14 October 2009 @ 11am

Excellent post! Amen! Thank you Derek.

I’m a developer and I’ve been approached for years by SEO companies, I always ignored their requests to “team up” for the obvious reasons like that I could manage the 20 seconds of text placement myself. You are right in that these things should be obvious for any web designers.

One day I humored one such SEO company and decided to piggy back on a job bid and see what would happen (desperate times I guess, lol). Well when he accidentally sent me the estimate instead of the client, I saw he just doubled my developer estimate (which included design & production of an entire website) and decided that his work was now worth the equivalent of mine… that pretty much sealed the deal for me!

This article now places a massive steal trimmed concrete door on top of that seal.

Now how about the perversion of click thru advertising! cover that next please : )

Posted by Shaheen on 14 October 2009 @ 11am

I totally agree with you Derek. Good show. Now, taking your advice, I wrote about it and even linked back to your post. Check it here:

http://markmroz.com/2009/10/14/search-engine-optimization-is-crap/

Posted by Mark Mroz on 14 October 2009 @ 12pm

Thank you for this post and the previous one. The examples you gave are the extreme in evil…but I think that even the ‘harmless’ examples hurt us all. For instance, using SEO to get your online shoe store to the top of the results of search instead of working on providing awesome service and selection. Then you have all these people clicking through and having awful experiences so they decide to never trust buying shoes online again, which damages potential business for all the other shoe stores. Or something like that.

Also…can’t say this on twitter because my Mom reads my tweets, but congrats on quitting smoking…it’s inspiring me to do the same!

Posted by Tara Hunt on 14 October 2009 @ 12pm

As a web developer (and not an SEO person), I thought it was obvious, but maybe not: “web developers” have not typically gotten involved with web content for the last 4 or 5 years at least.

Claiming that SEO is just a handful of technical web development best practices strikes me as rather naive. A bad developer can harm your site’s performance in search engine results, but that doesn’t mean a competent developer is going to have you covered.

It’s about content strategy, not keywords and meta tags. There’s work involved there. Where there’s work, there’s an opportunity for providing a service. And it’s not web development service, it’s content service — something that a creative agency or, yes, a (competent) SEO service can provide. Or you can do it yourself. Or pretend it’s a non-issue. Maybe you just don’t care.

No doubt most SEO “experts” are scammers, or at least spammers I wouldn’t want to validate by hiring. But that doesn’t make the SEO practice invalid, whether you DIY or hire someone or just ignore it in ignorant bliss.

Posted by Laura on 14 October 2009 @ 1pm

Well – this is why you need SEO consultant – have a look at @Josh comment on the previous post where he wrote:

“I couldn’t agree more. I once hired an SEO to do my site. He like totally screwed it up. First, I wasn’t ranking anywhere. Then he made my site rank really well for a ton of terms. Then I redesigned my site in Flash. My site fell off the Google completely. Obviously, he was using shady tactics that failed to work in the long run.”

Well, if Josh has kept his SEO expert who ranked him so well for his site before redesign, then Josh would know that desinging his site in Flash WILL cause for the site to drop off completely from Google…

Posted by Jane on 14 October 2009 @ 1pm

“But I use SEO for good.
Then you’re called a Web Developer.”

I suppose there are some developers out there who have time in their schedules to do keyword research, competitive analysis, pour over web analytics, and then write pages of content and/or press releases that are engaging to readers and also keyword rich, AND know how to leverage that content using social media…but I have yet to meet one. Most developers I know are breaking their backs trying to learn more code and improve their design skills (plus selling if they’re self-employed). Sure, if a developer had ALL of these skills, that would be great and I’m sure they’d be rich. In the real world, there are only 24 hours in a day and most of us have to specialize somewhere.

Posted by Jen Nahlik on 14 October 2009 @ 2pm

My hypothesis is that 1) an average web developer likely lists content-first strategies and coding practices on a lower tier within their skillset; 2) an average SEO consultant likely lists people-first over bot-first strategies on a lower tier of their skillset; and 3) #2 is a much better pitchperson of the results of his/her skillset than #1 is, especially when considering clients who don’t know the difference but need something quick.

It’s incumbent on us web developers to own content-first practices, refine them, and bring them to bear to all our clients. Many of us don’t take the plunge. The optimization types will always fill in those gaps we devs do not fill in.

A good post, Derek, with lots of emotion.

Posted by Kevin Dougherty on 14 October 2009 @ 2pm

The fact that big corporations and failing print magazine companies pay for SEO just tells me how facking stupid and lazy they are.
The fact that SEO firms exist is to take money from the stupid fackers above.
It’s supply and demand, so what.
There are those of us, however, that do our own SEO both on and off page for the benefit of ourselves. We are smart enough to write good content for people and search engines and also send quality links to our compelling content. We out rank big companies who hire SEO firms to get them ranking for their keywords. It’s hilarious!..we laugh about it. L.O.L.
Doubt you know many folks like us, cuz there ain’t many around… that’s why we do so well.
Keep raging man, it’s fun.

Posted by Allyn on 14 October 2009 @ 4pm

I’m closing comments now because I’m tired of deleting comments from people who can’t be bothered to read. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Posted by Derek Powazek on 14 October 2009 @ 8pm