Is it time to get out of the SEO business? Options

[tosheroon]

The basics are still valid...

1) Choose your keywords wisely.
2) Put up a lot of content that is relevant to those keywords
3)Get a lot of links from pages that are semantically related to your pages - maybe you no longer need the exact keyword phrase in the inbound link.
4) Sprinkle the magic keyword dust throughout your title headers bold/strong/em/italic/body text.

...and up against pages that don't follow those principles you can still impress clients by coming out top ten in a month or so.

But already since Florida no two SEO's can agree on anything beyond that. It may be that some of them have learnt new tricks and they're just playing dumb but I'm willing to bet that most are just going to buy more domains, make more sites and focus the links on one killer site.

It will still work now but as the algo becomes more complicated predicting what will put a site on top becomes harder. Eventually with so many weights and checks and balances, it will be like predicting where a drop of rain will fall - maybe god could do it but god alone can ignore brownsian motion and chaos theory.

A trustworthy SEO firm is already about as hard to find as an ethical timeshare promoter and it wont be too long before clients catch on that there is no magic formula, no thousands of search engines to submit to, no secrets of the search engines.

The markets chock full of people who read 3 posts on a forum last june and discovered they could charge their clients extra if they used a bit of SEO-speak.
There's room for a few corporate consultants especially if you include pay per click, viral marketing and branding in your brief. But the law of diminishing returns has reared its ugly head, google will continue to make its algo more difficult to decipher so for most people its time to ask the question "Is it time to get out of the SEO business?"

There's usability or accessibility research, XHTML, cross-platform compatibility and PHP content management to sell instead. Or we could go back to building and maintaining web page. Without the jargon and marketese in ten years we'll end up with the same status as plumbers and car mechanics and there's nothing wrong with that at all.

Just a thought.

[Ron Carnell]

… but as the algo becomes more complicated predicting what will put a site on top becomes harder.

When I was a kid, and the U.S. was still struggling to put its first man on the moon, I used to build rockets and set them off in my backyard. I didn't know it at the time, but what I was really building was pipe bombs with one end open, and it's a bit surprising I'm still here to tell the story. That I managed to actually get a few aloft was a testament to luck, not knowledge. I didn't realize, of course, that "rocket science" would one day become a cliché for something complicated, but I've often wondered how many NASA scientists had similar childhoods.

I'm not sure I have the smarts to ever to be a rocket scientist, but I've always been grateful that some do. They are an elite group of men and women, well respected, almost revered, and they certainly earn every penny of their high salaries.

Time to get out? Or time to get serious?

(Maybe ten years from now, someone's signature will allude to complexity by saying "no SEO"?

[tosheroon]

You're right the tag line's a bit silly I meant "no jargon" - that I'd explain the process in language the client could understand rather than scientific formulas - not "no clever stuff". :oops:

In your analogy though i think seo's are the talented but underfunded russians getting an early lead where as google would be Nasa striding ahead.

On-page SE optimisation is already like ESA's beagle 2 lost and blind on mars. I also think that artificial link building will eventually go the same way.

What do you think about think about "No double-dutch, No artistic Temperament" or Gobbledegook?, no jargon no attitude, hmmn negatives aren't good in a slogan...I better stop now before they cart the thread off to the writing copy section, but it makes me worry when a guy that builds pipe bombs talks about getting serious, somebody should notify homeland security if the use of the phrase hasn't sent alarm bells ringing in the CIAs webwatch program already.

[Grumpus]

Actually, it's at times like this when I am tempted to get in to the SEO business. These "shakeups" are what make it all fun and interesting. The surprising thing here (or maybe it's not surprising, what do I know?) is that all the things that have happened during this "radical change" are things that we, here, have been talking about for some time. Some of these concepts and ideas predate these forums by some months, even.

Having spoken to several notable SEO people in private over these past weeks, there are some common elements. The ones that I have tended to respect over the time that I've known them all reported pretty much the same thing. "Yeah, I had a few sites here and there drop maybe a page or two, but they are (or already have) worked their way back up near where they were beforehand (without any panic driven reworking of the pages). For the most part, though, nothing changed."

The other thing these people have in common is an awareness of not only "what works" but of the direction the search engines are headed. None of these directions contradict what people are already doing, but rather, they are an extension of the basics. If you keep up on it and plan for what "will work" while you optimize for what "is working now" then your technique just slowly and constantly evolves (as does the algo of the search engine). So, when the algo suddenly changes, it doesn't effect the people who have been paying attention as drastically. (At least in the long term).

Sure, some sectors were hard hit across the board (for reasons I've described in other posts). But it's a self-fixing problem for the people who were ready for it.

I would also suggest that the sectors that were affected 'across the board' are all very competitive sectors and thus, by nature, will tend to have more SEO done to the pages. If the SEO company is a "do what works without looking to the future" type establishment (which I suspect that way more than half of the SEO firms out there are), then it'll hit those competitive sectors more noticably. (If your sector wasn't competitive, then you wouldn't have the need to spend as much money on having someone rig your site to rank, so these less competitive sectors didn't show the change as much). Suffice it to say that while the speculation that says Google is using different algos for different terms may be possible, I tend to believe that the seeming usage of different algos can be explained by just looking at the nature of the sites within that sector. Since many among that set of competitive sites were optimized by "keyword people" and not those who have been using natural language and other techniques for a while, then it's difficult for the algo to come up with the "natural language" elements that are now more key to ranking the pages. (That's just one simplified example, there's more to it than that).

At any rate, back to the specific topic at hand - if you are serious about doing SEO - this is a great time to be in it. I'm sure that a lot of SEO firms have been or will soon be replaced very shortly by a new one. If you can demonstrate that there's more to SEO than random link exchanges and slapping keywords on a page, then you may be the one to benefit from it.

G.

[tosheroon]

Ah yes that is the question - Can anyone demonstrate that there's more to SEO than random link exchanges and slapping keywords on a page?

My point is that using natural language and well formated documents with relevant headings and titles et.c. is just good design not a special branch called SEO.

Of course good link strategies aren't random and buying a couple of 100 sites will still work if you put in the time to design a decent site for each one.

But I think that a seperate school of marketing called search engine optimisation will soon disappear and if its a golden age for anyone it'll be copy writers and content providers.

[Grumpus]

My point is that using natural language and well formated documents with relevant headings and titles et.c. is just good design not a special branch called SEO.

True, natural language is a key to this - but there's more to it than that. You need to use a natural language that is similar (i.e. contains common phrases and word groupings) to other sites in your "theme". If you are a very creative writer and use your own flowery terms and metaphors and analogies, then the impact of this isn't going to work for your page. There needs to be a "pattern among a group of pages" for this to kick in.

I've also used only the semantics portion of this in my examples. There's localRank and all sorts of other things coming into play all at once.

There is still, and always will be, a need to get keywords onto the pages (just don't get too dense with them), to build up your raw PR, and to do all the other things that every SEO, it's just that by having an understanding of everything present and what's likely to show up, it's becoming easier to blow the keyword stuffers and link farmers right out of the water. And, in low competition areas, a well written site may (one day) be self optimizing by its nature. In competitive areas, though, its different.

If everyone in that sector is using the same old methods to optimize, then those same old methods will continue to work (because that's all there is to compare by). As soon as a few of those sites start employing "big picture" techniques though, the whole field changes as those sites surge toward the top and shake up the others.

G.

[peter_d]

SEO is dead for me as far as clients are concerned, and has been some time. My offering is SEM, of which SEO is a small part. Corporate clients are interested in a measurable return. I've found that there is a good niche to be had if you can walk the marketing walk, and talk the marketing talk. Shape the service into something the marketing managers can fall in love with.

Like any business endeavor, building relationships is the key to turning SEO/SEM from a hobby into a business proposition. You need to be able to sell. The ability to perform the technical aspect alone does not a business make.

[Black_Knight]

If you are asking yourself this question, then maybe it is indeed time to get out.

Me? I'm happier than ever with my choice of career.

It is kind of weird really. The last couple of years have been the first and only long period of stability in the SEO business. It is the very fact that the situation is traditionally fluid, that new engines and algorithms replace older ones, that market share of the engines wax and wane, that has made this business so challenging. This level of change was hitherto the norm. This is the kind of stuff I signed up for.

Even then, the perceived stability was only really there for those who focused only on Google, and only on the status quo. In this same period of 'stability' we have seen Yahoo buy up most of the top-tier engines, we have seen Microsoft gearing up to enter the arena with guns blazing, we have seen radical new algorithms get developped.

Yet the SEOs who joined this game only in that small period of supposed stability are now terrified and suffering shock. It is almost like post-traumatic shock for some.

Joining the SEO game is a little bit like moving to LA. No matter that you've heard all the stories about quakes, you still are never prepared for the first one that comes along in your own experience. You can tell how long someone has lived there by the severity of the quake that they take in their stride.

If you don't like quakes, then yes, it probably is a good idea to move away. But don't think that LA will shut down any time soon.

If you can't see the justification in SEO then yes, move away. Don't expect SEO to disapear any time soon.

Can anyone demonstrate that there's more to SEO than random link exchanges and slapping keywords on a page?

Real SEO was never about those things. Of course there is more to it than exploiting the loopholes that were always going to be the first ones to be closed.

SEO is about understanding search, and using that understanding to bring the maximum benefit you can to the marketing objectives you're working on.

It starts from the most basic understanding of knowing where people search. Anyone who focuses their attention on a few, choice search engines, rather than the thousands of trafficless psuedo search sites that crop up endlessly just to grab the advertising money of the unwary has started to learn the basics.

Understanding how people search comes soon after. Not just in terms of recognizing high-volume keywords, but also in terms of recognizing what their value is. Sex is a high-volume keyword, but does it convert to sales of bathroom fittings? Understanding when a search term that has half the volume of a larger related term, actually offers double the value is along that path.

Understanding how search engines work, what their business models are, and how things fit within their five-year plan are vital to true SEO. Which results will be seen as the algo working right and so be encouraged? Which results will be seen as poor quality, and be the focus of upto 50 PHDs to eliminate? Which elements of search are stable in the short term and which are already targeted for improvement?

If you ever for a moment thought that SEO was about 'slapping keywords on a page' or about 'random link exchanges' then where on earth have you been? This forum has been telling everyone that all that crap of keyword stuffing and reciprocal links was a doomed shortcut, nothing more than crass corner-cutting, ever since we opened. The people who post regularly in these forums have been saying it far, far longer.

If you want to learn what SEO really is then you could start with the Quick Kick Start Guide to SEO.

The simple fact is that SEO works. Not only that, but SEO can make the difference between success and failure for even huge companies.

[tosheroon]

and once all those factors:- high top , local rank, stemming, semantics, registering previous clicks, and more are in play and inter dependant. They could be complicated by a random factor introduced purely to shuffle around the position of the top 30 most relevant resources, time how long visitors stay on the site and re-order them accordingly.
Then no-one will know exactly how to replicate the effects that took those sites to the top and SEO ceases to be a science based on observation and experimentation and becomes a movement or a religion.

I believe google will be able to look for groups of words that it knows are related and increase the value of links from a page that seems related to another, I believe that google will be able to look at clusters of sites that link to each other and figure out, by the way they are interlinked, if the linkage is natural or planned, I believe that google will be able to look at your search history compare it with everyone elses and predict from that which" paris hilton" you're looking for at what time of day and I believe that google will be able to find the most relevant page for your search query - all of these things have not yet come to pass but come to pass they shall and on that day woe unto he that has only optimised his pages, better that he had spent his time creating excellent content.

...and one day maybe those flowery phrases will help ths forum rank better for religious searches :twisted:

[tosheroon]

:shock:Whoah hold your horses Ammon, I am not nor have I ever been an optimiser, what I like is making web sites.

I have no personal axe to grind, my sites did fine during the recent storm and the quote you rammed down my throat was actually my quoting grumpus.

For those highly competitive phrases there's certainly money to pay someone to find ways of beating the algo - but in all other areas - eventually the algo will improve and the resource which best answers the searchers question will come out top.

What I mean is that we should concentrate on optimising sites for people not search engines.

Marketing is probably an honourable profession, search engine optimisation alone rarely is.

[Blue]

What I mean is that we should concentrate on optimising sites for people not search engines.  

...but a machine cannot present sites optimized for a person to a person when it cant identify as a person....a human brain.

[Kali]

Marketing is probably an honourable profession, search engine optimisation alone rarely is.

Personally I'd put it the other way round

Search engine optimisation is an honourable profession - maketing alone rarely is.

But then again i'm biased - on the other hand I've seen marketing people promise the earth and have absolutely nothing to back up their promises.

[peter_d]

I've seen marketing people promise the earth and have absolutely nothing to back up their promises.

No SEO has ever done this

I find individuals can act honourably. The profession in which they choose to operate will undoubtedly feature people from both ends of the spectrum, and everything in between.

[dannysullivan]

But already since Florida no two SEO's can agree on anything beyond that.

This isn't a post-Florida thing. There's been disagreement about tactics with SEO for as along as I can remember -- and I can remember back to 1995

Neither will you necessarily see a change. Other marketing industries have disagreements over tactics. All PR people don't act the same way, nor is every television ad the same. Direct mailings constantly change in format and pitch. There's no reason to assume that search engine marketing is dysfunctional because people do things differently.

A trustworthy SEO firm is already about as hard to find as an ethical timeshare promoter

Hardly. There are plenty of trustworthy SEOs. Yes, anyone can hang up an SEO shingle. But anyone can do that with other businesses on the web. We don't say that finding a trustworthy web site on online commerce business is impossible, just because the web enables some non-trustworthy companies to thrive. Heck, non-trustworthy companies thrive in the "real world."

Is it time to get out of the SEO business

Again, not a post-Florida question. It's more like a post-AltaVista, post-Yahoo paid submission, post-entrance of paid listings, post-link analysis/Google question. These are just some of the constant changes the SEO industry has faced over the nearly ten years its been running now.

The answer is yes, if you assumed that being successful with search engines was simply understanding how to optimize a page following rules A, B and C. Once that formula breaks, you're in trouble if you can't figure out a new one. And that formula has broken many times.

The successful SEOs are those who go beyond this. They understand how to select and target the appropriate terms. They understand the value of good content. They know how to work to get good, lasting links. They recognize which search engines are rising and ensure they focus efforts on being included in them in various ways. All very much in keeping with what Black Knight said above.

The even more successful ones understand they need to transition from SEO, pure optimization of web pages, to SEM. They become search engine marketers and understand how to balance both paid and unpaid listings, getting the benefit of both worlds. The really successful ones will brand out into conversion analysis.

Of course, there's still the successful SEOs who will chase the formulas with engine fodder. They'll be successful because they're diligent about reverse engineering as much as possible and coming up with mechanisms to feed in lots and lots of pages. Someone who's read a few posts on a forum isn't going to compete with that industrial scale.

My point is that using natural language and well formated documents with relevant headings and titles et.c. is just good design not a special branch called SEO.

I would disagree. It is true many web sites naturally have what it takes to do well with search engines. But a good title does not equal a good title for a search engine. For example, let's say you have an article on your site about choosing the right pair of shoes. Here's a potential good title:

Getting The Fit Right

Nothing wrong with that, when you consider your reader will understand the headline in the context of the web site and the particular content of the page. It's about getting the right fit with shoes, obviously. But someone educated to SEO will understand the the important terms are missing. They'd be inclined to do something like:

Getting The Right Fit With Shoes

That's still pretty lame -- I haven't done any keyword research for this topic, so who knows what the most operative words are. But it's not just a pure win for copy writers. They need to be educated. They also don't understand anything about link building, which will remain important. And design issues? That still does have an impact, not to mention the overall architecture of your web site.

Don't sell yourself short. SEO very much has a unique set of skills that is complementary to the overall web site production process.

[JohnScott]

The even more successful ones understand they need to transition from SEO, pure optimization of web pages, to SEM. They become search engine marketers and understand how to balance both paid and unpaid listings, getting the benefit of both worlds. The really successful ones will brand out into conversion analysis.

Well said.

Don't sell yourself short. SEO very much has a unique set of skills that is complementary to the overall web site production process.

If you look at some of the toughest keywords, they are owned by people who go out and get links. Hundreds upon hundreds of links. Thousands of links. It isn't a pretty picture. It's nothing near to being a "professional" profession.

In fact, I know a 15 year old doing it.

Brute force SEO always wins out over the gentler, page-elements SEO. If the ability to spam hundreds of blogs and guestbooks is something to be proud of, I'm missing it. In my book, SEO is manual labor.

[DianeV]

Well said, Danny, and let me welcome you to cre8asiteforums.

I suspect that optimizing for Google has been so relatively easy, and the algorithm so relatively stable, that it gave a false picture of the skills and knowledge needed to optimize over the long term. As you say, algorithm changes have been going on for years.

Again, welcome.

[tosheroon]

Well yes Danny I am being a bit flipant but in the example you gave the title of the shoe page should read something like "how to choose shoes that fit" not in order to rank on search engines but because people are reading that tag to find out if the page is relevant to their needs.

I take the point that there's no need from a design point of view to stuff headers with keywords but I don't think there is from a SEO angle either once all this semantics kicks in. What is important now as John Scott says is getting an insane amount of inbound links but that may soon change.

Broad based globally aimed business in highly competitive areas needs marketers branders sem's or seo's and ppc analysers. But for the average small business, in niches or limited by geographic location I don't believe that on page SEO has much effect.

I've a lot of respect you, black knight and a lot of the others that post here its exactly those read 3 posts put a shingle up people I'm talking about.

[DianeV]

You have a point, tosheroon. But those people would be the same ones who believe that a website of any kind will automatically convert visitors to customers simply by virtue of its existence.

While it can be argued that, for most online ventures, the cost of a website is substantially lower than the costs involved in establishing a store, that does not mean that any slapped-together pages will do the job. I will admit that I've seen *some* rather poorly executed websites do well, but I would suspect that that is not the norm.

Of course, we're talking about search engines here -- getting found -- but that is but one part of the whole package, the bottom line for which is sales, subscriptions, sales leads, etc. I'm just trying to illustrate that there will always be a need to learn one's craft and stay up to date -- and that, fortunately or unfortunately, this particular craft has a lot of parts.

[bwelford]

I think there has been a great deal of wise commentary in this thread. I always use SEO to mean Selling Effectiveness Optimization. This includes not only Searchability, but also Saleability (the customer-centric USP approach, etc.), Usability and Credibility. You've got to have them all. High rankings are great but they're only a small part of the equation.

Another important element is time. People talk about Internet time as if this is always fast. However in another way the Internet is slow. Just think about the time it takes to get listed appropriately in the Open Directory. Just think how long it then takes to appear in the Google Directory. Then there's the time it takes to get a web page indexed by Teoma, or sometimes even by AllTheWeb or Google. The Web is now so large that there is a huge inertia in the system.

Because of this, you must spend a great deal of money to get "almost instant" but limited visibility. If you want long-lasting durability to your search engine visibility, then you've got to go with the white-hat SEO practices that are being discussed in this forum.

[Adrian]

the example you gave the title of the shoe page should read something like \"how to choose shoes that fit\" not in order to rank on search engines but because people are reading that tag to find out if the page is relevant to their needs.

But in what cases are they going to be reading that tag? If they've just done a search and in the SERPs thats come up as the title of a page, yeah fine, they read it, out of context of the rest of the site and make some kind of judgement as to whether or not its relevant to what they wanted.

How about if they are already on the site and click a link to go to that page? Are they really going to take a huge amount of notice of the title tag there? Are they even going to look at the title bar to read it?

They are going to judge whether the page was relevant to what they wanted based on the link text from the page they came from and the surrounding text for context. That may or may not be similar wording to the title of the page. If the sites about shoes, it may well not have the added keyword saying 'shoes' as in Danny's 2nd example.

In that sense the title tag is all important for relevance when taken out of context of the site, such as in Search Engine Results.

I always feel writing good readable content is more important, but if you think about it a bit while you're going alone, you can add in extra little bits or word things slightly differently to help with SEO. Thats where the branch of SEO comes into copywriting, not that writing good content is part of SEO rather than usability or good design overall, but that with the extra thought you can make perfectly readable natural content better in an SEO sense.

It took more than a couple months to work out Google originally and for people to learn which tricks worked better than others. The recent update has just shaken that up again and making people think, don't see that its a reason to get out of SEO, unless someone got into it thinking it was easy money becuase others had already worked out all the answers for them....