Utterly Disillusioned With Seo, Is the Internet becoming over-optimised? Options

[BungleBob]

Saleability - 25%
SEO - Content - 10%
SEO - back-links - 15%
Usability - 25%
Credibility - 25%

Hehe - nice idea, I bet we could debate that one for some time to come!

"Type-in-Traffic" is a dead cert...

Venture - this is true, but isn't the whole essence of keyword targetting still taking a technical approach? Aren't we still playing an SEO game?

Looks like this thread could roll and roll, thanks for everyone's comments!

I'd like to add one small story:

Some years ago, in the bad ole days when I worked for somebody else (!), my desk was next to a "proper" marketing guy. He had training, degrees, experience - the whole thing. We used to work together on the company's fledgling website when the Internet was still a new phenomena in business.

In those days, we didn't even know aboout SEO or using search engines to generate traffic. And yet, I remember that this guy could bring more traffic via a couple of hours on the phone cracking partnership deals than any search campaign technique I've seen since...

"A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!"

[wurzel]

I was using Google UK this morning to search for web pages on "factoring" and despite every high street bank having a factoring subsidiary plus about another 70 independents, the top ranked site was Atradius of Germany and Google displayed the following :-

Factoring. Forderungsfinanzierung mit Atradius Factoring. Factoring ist der An-
bzw. ... Italien. Paolo Boneschi. Atradius Factoring Via Turati, 40 I-20121 Milano. ...

It may not be SEO gone mad but it may as well have been on an English language search engine

[BrianR]

"White hat" SEO is based on solid marketing techniques - we should rename this "web marketing". It's about plugging a product online - a legitimate and common business activity.

Well said, Richard!

Your views on this happen to fully agree with my particular prejudices. Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I fell into SEO from a marketing background!

BrianR

[rankforsales]

Bunglebob, hello

I agree with most of what you and the others have said so far.

SEO will become significantly more complex as time progresses. Additionally, like most people, I am also awaiting the outcome of the MSN engine soon. A company with over 50 Billion of cash and no debt is a major force in the search industry...

One must also be ready to see other search engines to appear within the next year or so, some with probably better and more powerful search technology.

However, to consistently rank high in the serps's, there are certain things that don't change, which is what a call the "Classic SEO White Hat" techniques such as paying attention to your title tags, your description tags, your headline tags and, most importantly the body of your text and your keyword frequency / ky. density, etc.

Let's see what the next 12 months hold in store for us, and, oh yes, let's not forget the great technology Yahoo! has developed and will continually develop, even in the aftermath of a public Google.

[Haystack]

A search for the term 'Travel' generally returns what I'd consider to be authoritative sites for this very generic term, yet running more specific searches for a combination of the word 'hotel' with any geographic term tends to leave something to be desired on every major search engine today. What happened and who's to blame? In this case, I think some of the major travel sites are to blame because they've done a poor job optimizing their destination content, which allows less credible sites to float to the top.

Is this to say that the biggest players in the industry should dominate every term? Of course not, but they should be able to outrank horrible looking sites that customers would never trust with their credit cards.

Are directories the answer? To a certain extent, yes, but they'll never be able to handle even a small fraction of the content a search engine can index.

BungleBob, SEO won't be a dead industry until every web site is ranked #1 for every relevant term. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) Sure, you can't control the engines, but how is that different from the work of PR companies who can't directly control what gets covered in the media? An online business clearly needs more than a good SEO to be successful, but that also doesn't mean that SEOs are on the way out.

Is the goal to rate vendors? That's certainly a growing industry. Why should I care who I'm buying a Disney cruise through? I won't unless something goes wrong, so there may be a benefit from selecting an agency through something like Shopping.com. Creating an authority site that helps sort things out should help people who find that site and lend some credibility to the site's search engine rankings, so that should indirectly improve the quality of related search results.

[BungleBob]

Creating an authority site that helps sort things out should help people who find that site and lend some credibility to the site's search engine rankings, so that should indirectly improve the quality of related search results.

If that's what we can achieve with the directory, and to some extent level the playing field for the "good" guys to get somewhere in the SERPS, I'll be a very happy chap. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[lyn]

The person who optimizes to offer a service or product uses the heading tags (ex. <h1>Title</h1>) because he or she knows the search engines give credibility to these tags in a web page. Honestly, for what other reason would a commercial website use those plain-looking heading tags?

The <H> tags are far more valuable for structuring content than for formating. It's easy to give headings under an <H> tag whatever look you want through plain tagging or CSS. Where they are really useful is for creating content that has a logical, reader-friendly structure with well-focused and scannable writing before the page designer gets to play with it.

That's why a commercial site would and should use them. Their actual value in SEO is questionable, other than the value of helping to make the content better.

L.

[mcanerin]

I agree entirely with Lyn.

To me, the base starting point of organic SEO is to create the best website possible, and not necessarily because of the "flavor of the month" preferences of the search engines.

I use the most compliant and accessable code practical, I use the document structure properly, and I make sure that the navigation and design are easy to use and fast. THEN I do my SEO stuff.

Interestingly, once I've done the above, there is often very little I need to do, SEO-wise. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Ian

[lyn]

Not to be the devil's advocate or anything, but isn't all marketing inherantly evil.  The goal ins to convince the people who have too much stuff to get even more of it?  We tell our kids to share, but we show them how to be gluttons.

I think that this definition of marketing is accurate to the extent that it's accurate to say the goal of SEO is to stuff SERPs with irrelevant site listings. It reflects only the tactics of a certain segment of cynical practitioners.

Where I live, marketing is about trying to hook up people with specific needs to the right solutions. We go to a lot of trouble to identify what our prospective customers really need to improve their business performance, health or quality of life; we recruit, train and support highly capable people to develop products and services that satisfy a matrix of needs better than anything else; then we go to work trying to reach those people and explain what we've done for them.

There's lots of deceptive marketing going on and lots of marketing for wasteful, useless products. But that's not what marketing is, IMHO.

L.

[magician]

It's easy to give headings under an <H> tag whatever look you want through plain tagging or CSS.

Isn't this a form of cloaking?

[qwerty]

No, it's just formatting. It only becomes deceptive (and even then not cloaking) if the formatting is used to hide it or make it look like something other than a heading.

[Zeke]

I think that anytime you look at something using only itself and it's direct variables as context you lose a lot of valuable perspective. For example, saying that SEM is not a viable business because it's outcome is controlled by other companies is like saying that the stock market is not a viable business to get into because it's outcome is controlled by (the emotions of) companies and people. It just seems very jaded, and being negative about anything isn't going to help out the end situation.

The world is inherently logical, and anytime something seems as if it is not logical, you're probably just not looking at it in the right light.

Not trying to be a flaming first-poster or anything, just my young, uneducated, personal insight.

[torka]

Welcome to the forum, Zeke! Good first post. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

(And anybody who can correctly spell and use the word "inherently" in a sentence has no business claiming to be uneducated! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/lol.gif) (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smartass.gif) )

--Torka (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/mf_prop.gif)

[Haystack]

Welcome to the forum, Zeke. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/bye1.gif)

[Jill]

I think this thread speaks to what we discussed in another thread about a month ago where we were talking about calling what many of us at this forum do, something other than SEO.

If one thinks of SEO as essentially "spam" and trying to place your site in the top position at all costs, then yes, I agree with BungleBob that it will eventually be a dying art (or science). Which is really not much different than I've been saying for many years. (At least since I've been writing about SEO!)

The good news is that those of us who've been learning about and practicing website marketing as a whole will be going strong for a long while. It's true that it's not a method for guaranteeing #1 placement for any phrase, but that's not necessary for most sites. Getting a good representation across all the search engines for tons of keyword phrases that are relevant to what you do, is fine for the average business. Heck, it's more than fine. It can mean the difference between success and failure.

Regarding directories and trying to classify the web that way, I have to say that I've never been a fan of directories. You'll never have a chance to find "everything" in a directory, and I like to have my options open.

(As an aside, DMOZ was not even close to the first to come along and try to classify the web through human eyes. Yahoo and many others before them, came long before. Interestingly enough, DMOZ was created as GnuHoo...then Newhoo as an alternative to Yahoo, because Yahoo was undergoing the very same problems that DMOZ has today!)

And also, as mentioned in the original post, I do think the the search engines most definitely would like for SEO to not work at all so that eveyrone will buy ads. That's what the infamous "Florida" update was all about, and still today, some 9 months later, Google has never been the same.

Jill