I had been planning to write a little something about search engine optimization versus quality website content for a while now. Then what do I discover this morning? Someone else has said pretty much the same thing, only with a much sharper point. But before I humbly link you over to him, let me regale you with a story from the recent past…
When we send out quotes, we try to break things down into detachable parts so that if a client doesn’t have the budget for a certain feature, they can decide to leave that out or perhaps just postpone it. One of those parts used to be search engine optimization. So for a certain price, we would undertake various tasks that would help them rank better in Google, basically. We stopped having it as a separate item after his conversation with a client:
“So… this search engine optimization stuff… You’re going to do blah and blah and that’s going to cost $x?”
“That’s right.”
“So what if I don’t opt for this part? What will you do differently? Will you not do these things?”
“Ummmm….”
You see, the “blah and blah” there were really basic things like properly titling pages and adding alt tags to images. Of course we were going to do those things anyway; that’s just part of building a website (the right way). There are other things you can do, of course, but the more I analyzed those other things the more obvious it was that they were more about creating quality content than SEO tricks.
Think of it like a resume. Your “quality content” are the facts about your education, experience and other qualifications. Sure, you can embellish it with fancy fonts and half-truths, but even if that gets you the job, if you can’t live up to it you won’t have that job for very long.
Bottom line: there are two very simple ways that we approach “search engine optimization”:
- building your site properly
- helping you with your content
Now back to that other guy that says all this much more directly (and more harshly) than I ever would. Please welcome Derek Powazek to the stage with his brilliant article “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” and its equally blunt follow-up: “SEO FAQ“.