Why SEO is seen as fraud and clever at the same time

01 Apr

Posted by admin as Marketing, SEO, Tutotorial

I was in a chat room on the Internet Chess Club the other day and someone read my profile and said I was an “seo expert”. The predictable barrage started from a couple of presumably very able web developers about the SEO industry being a bunch of snake oil charmer salesmen and general charlatans.

I’m not saying they didn’t have a point, but it depends on what you are asking the optimiser to do. If you are asking them to put you in the top three organic positions for [insert phrase here] on Google, then you have already committed a cardinal sin. The search guy taking the challenge might also have threatened their entire client list by taking that challenge on head-on at the same time. Why? Because being one of the best three companies for [insert phrase here] is not the search experts’ responsibility. It’s yours. Think about it - If you are NOT one of the best three companies for the chosen vertical, then any effort to pretend you are is just that… pretence. Search engines try (not always with success) to avoid conning the searcher into being where they don’t want to be.

Now – a search friendly website can dramatically improve your chances of being seen on the search engines. Good content pushes you further. But the real marketing clincher for any business in the real world is reputation. Brand is the offline embodiment of “reputation” and how the engines (and their users) react to your site in search is the online equivalent.

Now plenty of people will say words like poppycock (but much shorter and succinct) and when you look at the quality of search engine results in general I think it is fair to say that most times, engines don’t return the “best” results, but “adequate” results. The results are only adequate because people are manipulating them, still with some success. But I say look at the bigger picture. We are still only 5% of the way into getting search right. Of course results won’t always be perfect. But ignoring or trying to short-cut the intended strategy of the engines to return the “best” results has to merely be a short term objective. The SEO companies that have survived since 1999 are the ones that generally held that philosophy to be true. Help a company to be best, don’t help them to bypass that responsibility.

This news may come as a bit of a pain in the neck for affiliates hoping to score big on Google, rake it in and retire. But creating a brand reputation is not hard. Just best done by doing what you do best as well as you can. Everyone in search has heard of Matt Cutts, but less have heard of the girl that heads up Google’s Webmastertools team.Vanessa Fox started her blog in March and has just released her April stats and the article highlights exactly the challenges for any newbie site. I’m confident her one girl (nude) brand will stand her in good stead. The moral is that you can position yourself as one of the best in any of a million niches and then you can make that niche bigger. Any affiliate can still do that – but you better come to the Internet armed with more than a domain name and a blog. You need a strategy to become the best in your niche.

[Via]