Who needs good, relevant content when you have linkbait
Good relevant content is linkbait, and it’s usually a lot better than this sorry attempt at socialist-tinged controversy.
You’re a poor man’s Jason Calacanis, Atwood, which is a truly sad place to be. Enjoy.
I’m sorry Jeff, but I’ll have to disagree with you here, when I’ve had to update sites for people, I’ve seen such a mess made by the previous developers. Sometimes I get lost in the what they’re trying to sell, market, or whatever, based on their designs.
Don’t forget that it is far cheaper for a mom and pop shop to hire a “SEO” firm rather than a good developer. The way they look at it is, we’ll pay a few hundred dollars a month to someone, rather than pay $5K to redo our entire site.
I agree that you wouldn’t need SEOs if it wasn’t for bad development, at the same time if you look at majority of small business sites, they’re pretty much something out of the box, the hosting company provided them with, and more often than not it’s crap.
We can’t brush all SEOs with the same brush, granted most do fit the bill though.
I actually can’t believe you’ve taken the time to write this tripe (nor that I’ve actually bothered to comment on it).
Organic search is a fundamental channel of the online environment. Apart from being a suberb low cost traffic generator,if nothing else it is the lowest common denominator and can greatly magnify the effects of promotional work through other channels. In short, good defensive SEO means your name/brand in lights where it needs to be on the web. Good aggressive SEO can position your name/brand at the forefront of relevant current events and drive significant revenue.
Web development without SEO is an absolute abortion and diplays a basic lack of understanding of the way that humans use the internet. If you can’t see the value of SEO, you should make sure you stick to backend applications or get out of the business altogether. SMM tactics are motivated by the same manipulative marketing needs that drive all other channels, period. To throw all SEOs in with the black hats is naive.
Now, have I just fallen for link bait?
The most priceless example validating this blog entry? The comment above mine, clearly comment spam by some jackass trying to get a backlink to boost his PR:
You’ve taken a few random quotes completely out of context.
If this isn’t linkbait, then I think you don’t understand much of the web world. Many sites fail, not because they’re not good, but because no one ever sees them.
Yes, there are people that try to f**k the system - there always will be. However, a lot of SEO is about making sites more efficient for the person, because most of the tactics that give you good rankings are just good web practices.
You’re absolutely right! I was thinking of the same thing a couple of days back, and was happy I had something to start blogging (again) with. You’ve beat me to it.
A lot of people have said that you’re generalizing, but in my mind, SEO isn’t respectable anymore. It’s long fallen from its ‘specialist’ status, and now it’s down there with Youtube; Everyone does it, and most do it badly. And the reason for that is intent, as you rightly put it.
Man, I wish I could find a get rich quick scheme that actually worked. I have to admit though. SEO pervs have clogged the internet with junky spam sites and google eats them up. That’s why I just try to SEO my porn instead of SEO junk. Much easier.
What are we here, communists? Are we unhappy with economic models within the borders of the US or North America?
Porn is what it is, and is unapologetic about it. It’s pics and videos of people getting it on.
SEO in it’s various forms is people trying to change, alter or enhance how a website is viewed by another (massively) for-profit website cataloging service. That’s all.
Do you know that there are these distasteful groups of people out there, working in tall buildings covered in mirrored glass and stainless steel called “consultants”, whose only job is to change, alter or enhance the way a business is run, solely for the purpose of making more money!?! They hide behind these gates and large logoed signs with names like Accenture, Deloitte Touche and BCG (who gave all 101-level economics professors the BCG matrix to teach their students).
I couldn’t believe it when I heard about it.
I can’t believe how far society has fallen. When people will do things…for money!
I think you would do the world a great service if you were to make a stand for your beliefs and stop accepting pay for the work that you do. I mean, we can all get by on a little love, right?
“Love is all you need” - The Beatles
Hilarious! As someone said, this one is a good linkbait as well. Prepare to get tonnes of “pretty hard” linkbanks from SEO sites!
I have to disagree about SEOs from Jeff’s point of view. If the web is your business, then you probably want someone or somegroup doing search engine optimization, and based on some of the posts here, there seems to a legitimate business around this.
Just for example, take this site:
Now if I type in “Coding Horror” into Google, your site comes up #1 relevance. However, how many newbies woudl know that, no one.
However if I type in “programming discussion group” or something else a little more generic that I am interested in, no Coding Horror. Then I would miss out on the fine content here. I would probably end up someplace like “Joel On Software”.
For this site, not that big a deal, because this is not a commerical web site. But, if you selling computers, or stereos or something else over the web, relevancy is huge. If you get in on the first google page, 100s and 1000s of more visitors come to your site to potentially buy things.
I agree there is definately some “tricky” means of “pushing” your site and its content to the top of the relevancy list, and its not just coding titles in your HTML pages. Meta tags used to be a big deal, not sure if they still are. Knowing the way Google and other search engines work to make the relevancy rankings I can see someone paying for, espeically if your primary business source is the web.
It’s hard to defend SEO when you use the truly greedy as examples. Great linkbaiting, you are an expert!
Visit Google Groups or other forums and you will find many extremely smart SEOs helping others out while asking for little in return.
