SEO, the love that dare not speak its name
Sunday, March 4th, 2007
Search engine optimisation (SEO) has a bad name in some circles. Reputedly, any article with a slant favorable to SEO submitted to Digg is immediately squashed by the “Bury Brigade“.
SEO, of itself is not a bad thing. There, I’ve said it. If you create a web site, you want visitors, and you want them to be coming for the right reasons. SEO can help in achieving that goal. It doesn’t have to involve link farms or cloaking or spam blogs or any of the other annoying and ultimately pointless activities that have made it so unpopular.
Here’s something I realised the other day: if you consider the entire web as a great big social network, then Google, Yahoo, et. al. are its search facility and keywords are just tags. The appearance of your pages in search listings can also be thought of as a form of syndication. Maybe that’s why the Digg crowd are so down on SEO: it’s seen as like digging your own articles, so it goes against their ethos.
But the internet as a whole isn’t like Digg: indeed if it were, Digg itself would soon die. We can’t wait around for others to submit our pages for us. Traffic requires promotion, unless you are lucky enough to get in the news for some other reason.
Let’s drop the horrid TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) for a start and give it a name that’ll align it with accessibility and usability (which everyone agrees are good things): lovability. (Admittedly, to become lovable in this sense you have to be something of a tart, but what the hey.) Who could object to lovability? Every site needs to be loved, doesn’t it?
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March 5th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Hey there, first of all, thanks for the link love. I think you’ve got it right too. While many firms out there work very hard on SEO, I think ultimately we need to think why do we optimize a site for?
For most, we want traffic. Loads of them if possible!
But many of us fail to realise that what we want is the traffic, not the search engine placements. If we develop a site where people would love and would recommend it to others, there won’t be such a need for SEO - everything would be more community based and “viral”, isn’t it?
March 5th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
I was discussing this with someone else the other day. I see viral traffic and organic search as complementary. Viral traffic will help get you noticed in a very short time, but it can fall off fast.
But if you get enough links while the buzz is happening they have a much longer life, and it’s those that’ll gain search engine rankings for you. The hard part is getting attention for the right reasons, ones that’ll help your marketing.
They say “any publicity is good publicity”, and to some extent that’s true, but relevant publicity is best.
March 6th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Thanks for your thoughts Alfred, so ultimately, I think it would be good to balance the fronts - both optimizing for search engines for search traffic and human visitors for viral traffic.
But that’s really an art
March 11th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
I agree that the name should probably be changed as many consumers are confused by it, and it does have a bad connotation in many circles. Education of lovability is the only way we can change people’s assumptions.
I think great standards coding should always be the first step in creating any site. Once we get to a point where web designers incorporate great coding and modest keyword research skills and implementation into their work flow it will help free the industry to be two things: great content and creative distribution. Lovability (SEO) is fast becoming just this, great content (specific to the visitor or user it is try to target) and strategic, creative, sometimes viral ways of dissemination.
March 12th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Thanks for the comment, Zach. I wonder who’ll be the first to put “lovability consultant” on their business card? (With little hearts over the “i”s?)