The SEO Results You Deserve
By Craig Danuloff
Today Jason Calacanis helps us take another step towards honest language for online marketing. He does this by saying that some sites don’t deserve traffic.
He says it as part of an insult meant for the ‘snake oil SEOs’ and their clients, and in a post otherwise filled with ignorance regarding search engines let alone optimization.
But never-the-less, he’s exactly on target with the notion that the first step towards ranking well in the search engines is deserving to be ranked above everyone else.
What a great way to start a conversation about improving search engine rankings: “Do your pages deserve to be ranked #1 in Google?” “Is yours really the most relevant and important site on the entire internet relating to the word _________?”
The perfect ensuing discussion would review the merits and shortcomings of the website, define the editorial and structural changes necessary in order for both the client and the SEO to agree that the site deserves to rank highly, and plan the allocation of time and resources required to make the needed changes.
But even in this idealized situation the need for genuine Search Engine Optimization isn’t really reduced very much. Jason’s contention that “‘if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you're gonna do just fine in the rankings” is simply wrong – if by ‘fine’ you mean ‘achieve the majority of your potential in terms of organic search engine traffic’.
This thinking is a prime example of the concept of ‘coincidental SEO’ as mentioned in a previous post. And it completely ignores the fact that naturally occurring language, page structures, and often otherwise legitimate programming practices can severely limit organic search results. No matter how deserving the site.
Jason did very well with his sites, apparently without formal SEO. But he had the luxury of building blog sites which naturally include lots of ever-changing content and gain oodles of great inbound links, and he was doing it in a time when blogs were particularly well looked upon by the search engines. He also selected subjects with huge market interest and delivered compelling sites that captivated enormous numbers of people – so it’s easy to see how he believes you can ‘do fine’ without SEO.
But I have a simple question for him: Would things have turned out even better if your sites had generated 3x to 10x the traffic? Can you honestly say that you wouldn’t have rather had the significant incremental traffic that good search optimization would have provided?
Jason deserves all the success of Weblogs Inc. But he’s not doing anyone any favors by generalizing his experience into advice for others. Websites need to first focus on being best, on deserving the high rankings they aspire to – but then they have to systematically attain those high rankings by intentionally structuring their site, targeting their keywords, and otherwise optimizing based on the attributes the search engines measure. It isn’t enough to be the best, you also have to be perceived as the best.
PS: In no way should this post be taken as a defense of either the dishonest or clueless who make up the majority of the ‘SEO profession’.
Bonus link: On a related matter, you gotta love Greg Boser.
