Is SEO overrated?

For those who visit here regularly, my views on search engine optimisation “techniques” are pretty much known. Recently, I engaged in an online discussion in a forum thread which attempted to get different opinions on whether SEO was in fact overrated.

I chipped into the conversation with the seemingly provocative statement:

I believe that Google are absolutely correct in insisting on “the natural web”, where all content is written and structured for humans and humans alone and anything else is punished. I fully support the notion that if you present the information in any way differently to bots than you do to humans, you are cheating and deserve your penalty.

While some folks agreed with me, some, who obviously seem to be the SEO “experts” I enjoy making fun of, got just a little annoyed with me. I won’t reproduce our differences of opinion here, see the above link for the amusing details.

That particular discussion thread is now closed but these same SEO “experts” never responded to my challenge that search engine optimisation is a misnomer and the term should really be called something like “human reader optimisation” instead. In terms of optimising your website, you primarily need to address the following issues:

• How does everything you’ve done to optimise this page look to a human reader?
• Do the page titles accurately describe the content?
• Do the link titles accurately describe the link?
• Does the alt-text for images accurately describe the image?
• Does the content flow correctly when read by a human reader?

I asserted that even the smallest of businesses who have a website, could greatly benefit from a content management system because that would leave them to concentrate purely on writing quality content. Search engines would take care of the rest and rate their website on it’s real merits.

Probably the best SEO advice is offered by Google:

Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?

So, is there more to SEO than the above five points I advocated? Is SEO overrated as some sort of specialised skill which requires certain “wizardry” to get a website ranked high enough to be listed at the top of the search engine results?

Maybe. But why were these same SEO “experts”, who were quick to dismiss me as oversimplifying the situation, strangely quiet when I asked what it was that I missed in my five points above?

Posted in Business, Google, Marketing, SEO, Software, Usability, Web by Ivan