If you’re not a tool, you hate SEO as much as I do. If you hate SEO more than I do, you are possibly also a tool. What’s the deal?
It seems to me that people hate SEO because:
- There are a lot of people out there who call themselves "SEO experts"
- Most of what makes an "SEO Expert" an expert is stuff you can pick up by learning good baseline web design, or obtain from any half-decent web designer
- The extra bit required to be an "expert" that you can't get from reading a book or two seems to involve one or more of these:
- Telling everyone incessantly you're an expert
- Doing things that involve questionable ethics
- Making claims of some magic formula that results in certain successes
So here’s my foolish suggestion that will never be adopted: Let’s not do SEO anymore. Let’s do SEF.
We won’t “optimize” (the “O” in SEO) for search engines any more. That’s something that SEO experts do. I don’t know what it involves, but it’s basically accepting that rather than producing content that search engines would naturally pick up and index correctly, they’re going to do a lot of research on how the engines index pages, and make sure that whatever terms you randomly choose, they’ll artificially game the system to get you at the top.
Instead, we white hats are going to build our sites to be Search Engine Friendly. Sure, we’re going to do some stuff so that you make a good show in the engines. We’re not going to build your sites so that they don’t show up. We’re going to do the stuff that puts your content first – appropriate page titles, important content early, proper titles and links. We’ll use technologies like RDF because they’ll help your visitors find information on your site, not because it gives you some advantage in search ranking. We may suggest ways to be social on your own and get your own site linked, and we may code some features into the site to help you do this. But we’re not going to do those stupid things that the SEO experts do.
We’re not going to build tons of portal pages. We’re not going to make bold claims about positioning and ranking. We’re just going to do what’s right; put your content first, put your site first, and be friendly.
I realize that many of these self-styled SEO experts will say “that’s all we do, but more!” And many don’t see why we think they’re wrong. But I’m tired of clients who say some guy called and said that he’d get his site in the top page for his selected terms. I’m tired of seeing the web only that way; seeing client web success in SERPs. And I’m really tired of seeing not just the results of that type of search engine gaming, but the litter that the SEO experts themselves leave on the web trying to peddle their skeezy services.
I don’t have respect for people whose job it is to do “research” and convey their opinions to others who wouldn’t know any better how they can cheat the system.
