My parents don't know I'm in SEO. They think I play piano in a brothel Search Engine Optimisation is desperately seeking respectability, with “creativity” being the main buzzword at the industry’s big get-together – with the dark arts of “black hat” SEO scarcely being mentioned. More than 1,700 search engine optimisers and digital marketers gathered last Friday (18 September) in the UK seaside …
After all, explicitly, Google, Bing and friends do not want to be 'gamed', the entire value of their business is in giving better results than the other guy. To do this they use proprietory algorithms, as if they weren't proprietory they would give away their business advantage. As such, anyone promising insight into SEO is at best probing a black box with a really slow refresh rate, and guessing.
A whole conference based on guessing. The smart move was selling tickets.
I'm not surprised many SME businesses don't know what SEO is. Whilst this may be a big problem for the SEO companies is it actually a problem to the majority of the local market focused SME? My experience is that searching for "<placename> <businesstype>" seems to work pretty effectively, and even more effective is following links from business directories/rating sites.
Whilst this may be a big problem for the SEO companies is it actually a problem to the majority of the local market focused SME?
Isn't this SEO "industry" digging its own grave? After all, their existence is based on rigging search engines in their customer's favour, which implies that those that play it fair suffer the effects of what they do. The SEO industry appears to be part of an arms race, with on the other side Google trying to stop them rigging the game because it wants those rigging fees for itself (but it calls it "advertising").
That it does not have to go as far as "rigging" but simply properly presenting you web presence to the 'bots via you website code and content.
A crawler is not going to read a nice brand message embedded in an image, they dont like images without tags for example. Similar rules apply to sites that are accesible to being read out loud to the blind in making them machine readable.
You cant even think about rigging the results without getting through the presentatino baseline which, as discussed, can result in rebuilds of poorly implemented or ill considered websites.
Edit: Its the bit after this where the "Snake Oil" comes in. fixing a standard list of technical challenges will get your ranking up by default even if your content is still rubbish or irrelavant. You cant pay someone to make your marketing team make sense ater all...
Surely the very nature of SEO means that it can only work when most people aren't doing it? Once most web sites are using some form of SEO, it goes back to a level playing field where no-one has an advantage. It's a long term zero-sum game.
If Google is working to block these botton feeders, more power to it.
Yes, SEO can get you "unfairly" ranked higher, but the point is that search engine crawlers are computer programs and if you think ranking is important, even if you don't want to game the system, you'll at least want accurate classification.
It's like being small print or paying for an larger ad in a telephone directory: if you are going to pay for the larger advert, you really don't want it to be shit.
"Surely the very nature of SEO means that it can only work when most people aren't doing it? "
This is exactly the point about hedge funds and poisoned mortgage tranches, which caused the 2007-8 financial crisis. Hedge funds only work if everybody else is not hedging; poisoned senior debt only works if most senior debt isn't poisoned.
It's basically the same as farmers and golf courses; when everybody starts doing it, time to get out.
You cant pay someone to make your marketing team make sense ater all...
Vic.
"A crawler is not going to read a nice brand message embedded in an image, they dont like images without tags for example. Similar rules apply to sites that are accesible to being read out loud to the blind in making them machine readable."
You know that. Lots of people know that.
Does the same not apply to Flash as well as images?
Yet there are still idiots designing Flash-centric websites...
The number of unsolicited submissions I get from the 'contact' form on my personal blog seems to belie the assertion that these companies want to be taken seriously.
Anyone who even so much as casually glanced at the site would notice that it's a personal blog and contains the sum total of zero advertising.
Based on that criteria, why on earth would I want to (and I quote) "improve my search engine rankings to drive greater sales and profit to my door"?
Scumbags ... all of them.
Arseholes to a man. My site advertises web services and simple logic would dictate that I'm the last person to need website help; despite the fact that they usually claim to have looked at the site and sent an email from the webform (I suspect there's some sort of contact form bulk ninja-ing tool out there).
Often different (western sounding) names but the exact same text too. Time-wasting twats.
The basic point of SEO is to blag Google into listing a site higher than it otherwise would, so the whole industry is bent from the start.
Here our marketing dept is always on at me on how we improve our search engine rankings. They then say this person/business is going to get our rankings up for £XX is it worth it. They seem only to be after the quick fix.
They are never impressed when I tell them to submit their pages mentioning as much as possible in normal context the thing/phrase you want to be found and that is all this person/business is going to be doing and they can save themselves that £XX.
I'm unsure of how all these SEO companies can all offer to have you in the top X for a certain phrase. If they all do it who wins? Snake oil in my opinion.
Yeah, all sorts of muppets like that fall for it. I remember when I worked for a local authority the marketdroid equivalents telling me we should do this and that to improve our SEO ranking. As we were already first for any google query involving xxx County Council I found it difficult to get excited...
Not only are the SEO emails spam, but they "work" by spamming forums, facebook and everywhere else they can post a link to the site they are trying to promote. Much of the temporary boost in popularity in the site being promoted quickly fades as the site admins clean the spam from their sites. I spent time working as a moderator on a large internet forum and my first job of the day was to clean out all the new fake accounts, posts and links created by these bloody SEO companies. SEO == scum.
SEO companies treat the the concept of "Sales" as a dirty word that is someone else's problem.
As a web developer and owner, I have had far too much contact with these charlatans who really can't seem to connect the dots... it is the nebulous business model sites (like facebook and twitter) that only care about traffic... most of the SMEs are looking for SALES, CUSTOMERS... traditional things like that.
Its like marketing, but even less accountable (if that is possible).
I hope they all disappear up each other's butts.
A few moons back when working for a SME, the higher ups would frequently chime in with link farms, black hat SEO practices, trading databases of people's info for spamming people. You'd explain why the stuff they spouted was a bad idea but they would railroad the stuff through anyway. I would have hope things have changed by now but reading this I wouldn't bet on it.
This new 'skillset' is what? Content, Keywords, Adwords, "using Social Media" & SeoMoz if your company pays for the licence? Can't say I'm convinced, but happy to add the caveat that I'm nowhere near this stuff anymore.
Did I miss something or am I getting old?
To be honest you may as well wave a chicken at your computer when the moon is full and chant to the great god google.
Amazing that there's enough money around for these idiots to confer with each other.
My wife got an email from a SEO muppet about how her website was 'non optimal in the search space'. So I replied back asking how come he managed to find the site in the first place if it was so much 'in the dark space' (real quotes) and how come my wife's business is managing to do so well even without the benefit of Mr SEO Twat Face's input.
Reply came there none.
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Slapped together some hobby website just above a Geocities presentation and put in a request. Got listed two days later. I have no idea why people in forums elsewhere were bitching about not being accepted for n years but it was worth a snigger. I dropped the site registration a couple of years later and some cunt bought it up and filled it with Google Adwords and link bait so I asked Google to fuck them off... Having registered a new domain to run an e-mail server on I regularly receive e-mails from SEO folks offering their services. "Your Web Site....." Oh For Fucks Fucking Sake. I do not have a Web Site. Please just piss off to Spam Cop and welcome to IPTables. Agree with TVTW, 1,700 in one place was a wasted opportunity. Perhaps they can hold the next one on November 5th. Fuck them... fuck them all and their fucking long tail.
It's easy to paint all SEO professionals with one brush based on cataclysmically bad experiences with hucksters. I consider it similar to the way people think of "politicians."
But there are legitimate reasons a company wants to "be found" on the Internet, and there are legitimate ways to approach this.
When I'm searching for "barber in mycity, myneighborhood" I want to be able to actually find what I'm looking for, rather than, say, a manicurist halfway around the world. A legitimate SEO professional can help that kind of business achieve that kind of visibility, without resorting to BS.
Yeah, there are a lot of sleazy marketers out there. Bad experiences are real, and all too frequent. But it doesn't mean that engaging in the business is fundamentally evil.
PS: I'm not an SEO professional.
"When I'm searching for "barber in mycity, myneighborhood" I want to be able to actually find what I'm looking for, rather than, say, a manicurist halfway around the world. A legitimate SEO professional can help that kind of business achieve that kind of visibility, without resorting to BS."
Do you think the barber spending money on visibility will automatically be the best and best value for money for you?
Any old yellow page (heard of it?) system will do the job just fine. Since we don't have to actually print the Yellow Pages any more, the cost would be insignificant. Only it's a bit harder to influence the search result, giving no edge to those already loaded with cash. Finding something sorted on distance doesn't cost anything, except when a dominating search engine player wants it to cost something.
Basically you are just saying that you enjoy being manipulated, and not having to think one bit for yourself.
As I don't have time for a full treatise, and in the industry three years of experience is considered just enough to become a junior-level SEO, this is just a few brief points.
Search engines are not magic. They work on algorithms, which are themselves merely mathematical models of very complex issues. There are algorithms that attempt to quantify and measure "repute" for instance, and several that attempt to model and measure "trustworthiness", in addition to all those obvious things such as merely looking for the words used (basic pattern matching).
It is not only possible, but actually quite common for websites of even the largest corporations to use techniques and practices that are based on ideas in marketing from other disciplines - especially print and television (seen as close relatives of digital by many).
To explain that in the simple terms most prior commenters obviously need, think of the classic "Hello Boys" Wonderbra billboard ads. It doesn't talk about the bra. It doesn't talk about the benefits of the bra. It would be pretty much impossible for any search algorithm to apply analysis to the billboard presentation and assign meaning. But it was a superb piece of marketing from a top agency that gained attention all over the world and truly launched the brand that changed how the padded bra was perceived forever.
Some years ago, the Welsh tourist board had a television ad about their mud. It was clever in the way it tied together several things Wales is renowned for (Rugby, green grass, rugged countryside) with activities such as cycling, hiking, etc. But they tried to put that same style of marketing into their website, and of course, the search engines couldn't at all see any relevancy between the content of the marketing, and vacations in Wales.
The way people work (think, react to stimuli) is quite difficult to model algorithmically across billions of documents simultaneously in every language known to man, especially when what we say isn't always what is meant. We have these wonderful things such as allegory, metaphor, and yes, sarcasm, that can mean what is meant is entirely different, possible even completely opposite, to what is said or written.
A good SEO understands many of the limitations and capabilities of search engines. We've studied the works of legendary scientists such as Jon Kleinberg, who published so much on how networks form and work, including networks of people, networks of machines, and networks of data. We know of his seminal work on "Hubs and Authorities" which was one of the key influences on the PageRank algorithm that was what Larry Page and Sergey Brin had before they founded Google. And we know that PageRank is named after Larry Page, its inventor, not named because it ranks pages, because it doesn't and never has ranked pages.
An SEO is the person that can tell you that PageRank looks at individual URLs and how they link together, but is completely topic insensitive (it measures popularity, not relevancy), and that it was never made particularly to produce search results so much as to model a random surfer, and thus to measure the connectivity of URLs, and assess importance from that connectivity.
An SEO is the person that can talk about crawl priority, and talk about how your 10,000 page site is not all going to be indexed every single month, and thus your changes to some pages may take many months to be reflected in search results, yet explain why the BBC homepage can be indexed every hour fresh and clean for the latest news. We can help you ensure that the pages *you* believe are important are also seen as important to the search engines, so it isn't wasting time indexing your about page today while your latest product page was last crawled 3 months ago.
An SEO can be the making or breaking of many huge companies. I've helped ensure that company acquisitions for £100,000,000 happened, where a significant part of the valuation was based on turnover, and 80% of that turnover was driven by search traffic. I've also watched £10,000,000 deals stall because the company that was to be bought suddenly lost all its search rankings a week before due to some issue or other, and eventually sell at a far lower value if at all if they couldn't fix the issue within days.
And finally, yes, people get spammy emails about SEO. You also get spammy emails about pharmaceuticals, so I presume you also think that all medicine is nonsense, and chemistry is just make-believe.
You get the spam emails because the REAL stuff works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkQwB7LzzGE
An advert that I'd watch voluntarily (and sometimes did).
Industry please note.
But surely you don't need an "SEO expert" to tell you that it's really quite special, and that adverts like that are not universally applicable?
That one specific ad, perhaps not. But you know we could cite a thousand similarly metaphorical ads just from the past months alone. One wouldn't have to resort to just meerkats and opera singers to do so either.
At the time of that Welsh mud TV campaign, the Visit Wales website was very much in tune with it. The website was all large images and tiny amounts of text. A homage to the arts of visual advertising and the adage that "a picture speaks a thousand words" - which was great for people and loved by that Marketing Director, but which Google couldn't do much with at the time.
After all, advertising is part of marketing, just as SEO is, and marketing is aimed at people. Marketing is often about aspects and feelings of a product that are somewhat intangible. "Sell the sizzle, not the Steak" is the old maxim. So a lot of the time, a website is built to sell the sizzle, as the Director of Marketing learned, and barely mentions the steak.
To a large and real extent, an SEO is a guide and a translator. A great SEO understands marketing, and search technology, and bridges the immense gulf that lies between the two. Because while any fool could tell the Director of Marketing that he's wrong (and see how that goes, telling him your £50k SEO campaign for the year is more important to his business and budget than the £50 million he just spent on a six month TV advertising campaign that is already working), that's not the job. The job of an SEO is to somehow find a way to make his vision work. The SEO is there to create solutions to problems, not just point at them.
"thanks for helping dumbing down society"
Hmm, so I post a bit of education, explaining many complex things in simple plain English and such educational attempt is "dumbing down society"?
I think you've rather proved that certain sections of society are perfectly content to revel in idiocy despite my best efforts, not because of them. That they are stupid enough to then look at whoever seems to have expended effort, regardless of direction, to assign blame (because Lord forfend it should be up to them to seek wisdom rather than be force-fed it) doesn't make things better.
But, you are right that my work as an SEO is not necessarily about educating people, other than my clients. My job is largely to deal with reality, rather than change it. In any form of marketing, if you note that many of your customers are illiterate, it is part of your basic responsibility and duty to the job to realise that it is probably a lot more cost-effective to be marketing through TV and Radio, rather than trying to teach a million strangers to read for free just so they can read your print ads, which you'd still have to pay to print.
"You also get spammy emails about pharmaceuticals, so I presume you also think that all medicine is nonsense, and chemistry is just make-believe."
No. I just think that the "medicine" that is mentioned in spam is nonsense.
I really don't have clue what you are on about.
ammonjohns : very good points.
Seo jobs in IT and communication agencies doesn't need respectability because it already has it. Why would the industry crave for high profiles in seo fields if it was bs or scam/spam ? Ask yourself the right questions first : why is there a need for SEO ? Is Google search engine doing its job ? Are algorithms as acurate and clever as the medias say (and they will steal our jobs too) ? My 2 cents
As an SEO strategist at a global think-tank kind of publisher, I can only thank everyone involved in the full of misconceptional misunderstandings, plain stupidity and quite normal, albeit utterly unprofessional discussion full of biased judgment and negativity. I will regard it as an useful and freely provided survey, so thank you :)
Once worked for a company that also offered "SEO" services (they were down the hall). From what I was able to garner, the purpose of SEO is to deliberately ignore every terms of use, EULA, and contract condition in every search engine in order to game the system. Then take zero responsibility for lack of success.
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