Why SEO is a job…
So, I saw this post on Reddit “Why SEO is not a job” by Johnny Idol and felt compelled to write a reply.
I haven’t actually written in this blog for ages (as you’ll see if you check out my other posts) so hopefully what I have to say is going to be worthwhile. Now, i’m not an SEO expert, i’m a developer who knows a fair amount about SEO. I also work with a lot of SEO companies on behalf of clients so I have first hand experience on what they actually do.
First - SEO is a job, most definately. If SEO was not a job then people wouldn’t be able to make money from it. SEO does bring results, people look for increased results usually in revenue from either selling goods, services or advertising. When the revenue increases the search engine optimiser has done his or her job.
Like all jobs there are people who are good and bad, i’ve worked with both. The ones that are bad generally use trial and error - they don’t know what they are doing an read forums and blogs then implement what they read without understanding what they are doing or why.
In the “Why SEO is not a job” article the poster says:
Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his spare time, working on the strenght of contents or services offered
I totally agree, content is always what matters most - if you want to be found by a search engine but have no content you may as well give up. Unfortunately the poster is likening a small, personal website to a large company website. In a large company who is going to go through the pages checking the content, everybody there has a job to do already.
An SEO expert should also be good a copy writing have have the skills to improve content. Adding keywords and phrases throughout a page can be done but the general aim is to improve the quality of the content.
To really understand what a good SEO company will do you need to look at why they are employed in the first place - to increase profits.
A company will judge if an SEO expert has done their job well when their profits go up or down. The good companies I have worked with take SEO beyond just getting a website found by search engines, they look at everything.
Good SEO experts love statistics, Google Analytics usually, they just love the infomation in those log files.
An SEO expert who does their job properly will be setting up split tests - serving two version of the same webpage and analysing which one customers prefer.
I have seen split testing used on everything, checkout pages, product pages even domain names.
If you have an SEO company that is not using split testing then they have nothing to measure their results against - get a new company.
SEO is not only about bring customer’s to your website but it is also about keeping them there. There is so much more to SEO than just checking for valid html, correct http responses and things like ALT text on images. If you have an SEO company and this is all they do get a new one.
October 11th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Hi Dave, I have to say you beat me hands down (you even managed to capture one of my grammar horrors before I got the chance to edit).
I really appreciate your view on the subject - it brings out a serious core out of this SEO circus. My only purpose was to stir up some mess in order to stimulate discussion AND point out that statistically speaking (I do like to say statistically) it’s very easy to stumble on so-called SEO consultants who do not know dick about what they’re talking about.
I just want to make sure you read my last comment on my post, so I am gonna do one of the things I do best: brutal copy/paste:
//———–//
First of all thanks to people for teaching me grammar - hopefully some day they’ll let me join the grammar club in my town.
I admit I am mostly driven by prejudice but I really did some research before putting this down (meaning top ranked SEO websites on google - if SEO is so good I should have got good samples, statistically speaking) and I really can’t find anything more interesting than “word-density, “backlinks”, “google SEO tools”, “meta-tags” and other pretty basic and shameless shit like that.
I am going to quote myself from a previous comment that obviously people didn’t bother to read being this such a worthless blog.
Quote:
“I do agree knowledge is always a valauable un-material product.
At the same time we all know the net is dog-fight today, and imho whoever goes online these days needs to be informed, otherwise you’re gonna take it up the “A” from anyone, top of the list SEOs selling fried air. Not that different from those people selling crap to our grandparents, no doubt SEOs will be around for a long time, selling their services to a number of crippled companies.
I know a lot of people will be offended by my opinion, and I know that generalization is always wrong. I bet there are a bunch of techincally skilled SEOs doing a kick-ass job out there. But just a bunch.
Anyway a number of consumers associations are discouraging “companies which may run on completely different industry sectors” from wasting money with so-called SEOs. The same way you might discourage your grandparents from buying anything after they got fucked a coupla times.”
//————-//
Oh - and I really DO KNOW SEO consultants that wear tiny backpacks, who were dancers and/or graphic designers.
Cheers
October 11th, 2008 at 10:20 am
The entire purpose of SEO is to get the benefits of good quality content for poor quality content, you pay someone to try to game the search engines to give you a higher ranking than your crappy content deserves. Thats not a job, that’s SPAMMING.
You make your money devaluing the of search engines, making their results less useful so that your crappy content drowns out the really useful content. SEO is not a job, you’re a SPAMMER.
What do you call 100 SEO consultants dead at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.
Please die in a fire.
October 11th, 2008 at 10:28 am
By the sounds of it the line between SEO and general site optimisation has been blurred beyond recognition then.
I regard SEO as optimising the structure of your site as well as performing any necessary content enhancements with two main goals: Ensuring the site is appropriately ranked for search queries and to encourage inbound links to indicate quality content. An SEO guy may be on the ball about new patents from Google or other search engines so that they can predict upcoming changes in how sites will be ranked. I do believe there is plenty of scope for someone to be employed purely as an SEO expert but you’re suggesting that they go far beyond that attempting to improve sites.
You also seem to be suggesting that SEO people also get involved in user-acceptance testing which as far as I am aware is also done extensively by non-SEO people as well, at what point does the SEO person say “this is outside of my expertise”? Maybe they get involved in optimising the code that generates the pages to improve load times, or improving the dynamic image resizing algorithms to produce sharper thumbnails of products. Maybe they implement AJAX to allow for a more seamless user experience? Where exactly do the responsibilities of an SEO expert end?
How does A/B testing work in regards to SEO? Can you ask Google how it would rank 2 different versions of your site so that you can decide which is better? Or is it purely done at the user-acceptance level (which In my mind wouldn’t make it an SEO thing, it would be a usability thing)?
October 11th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
@Andrew Ingram
There is user acceptance testing which is usually carried out before a site/page goes live.
Split testing for an ecommerce shop might involve running 2 different versions of the same content for a product. Analysing the statistics from the page might show that users are 5% more likely to buy the product with description b. In this case the shop would then go with description b and make a lot more money over the year.
I think the boundaries of SEO and other forms of other web marketing has become blurred. Most search engine optimisation companies I know of will also run adwords campaigns for you too.
October 11th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
@Wrong
In the same way that a magazine employs a copy writer to write in a certain style for a magazine there is a job for someone to write copy in a style that appeals to a search engine. I don’t have a problem with it as long as they don’t lie in their content in order to achieve keyword matches that are nothing to do with that topic.
If I am selling a bag of cement on a webpage then there’s really not much I can write about it.
If I decide to include a tutorial on mixing and using cement I end up with decent content and the product I was initially selling gets a better result in search engines.
October 21st, 2008 at 2:13 pm
looking forward for more information about this. thanks for sharing. Eugene