SEO is bullshit
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a site’s presence in search engines, and trying to drive more inbound traffic from the search engines “organic”, or not paid, listings.
There are some commonly recognized “Search engine optimization (SEO) Techniques” that will generally improve your site’s ranking in search engines. They include such things as
- good choices in domain names,
- using keyword phrases that your users will be searching on,
- using keyword synonyms in your content,
- using keyword phrases in the <title> tag (<title>keyword phrase</title>)
- using keyword phrases in an <h1> tag (<h1>keyword phrase</h1>)
- using keyword phrases in your links (<a>link text</a>)
- Keyword Density
- Meta Description tags
- lots of fussing over “proper” URLs
- and more…
I know I’ll get lots of criticism over this, but to optimize your site for search engines is wrong.
We should be optimizing our sites for humans. In fact, even Google doesn’t recommend the use of the many Search engine optimization (SEO) firms out there. Too often firms employ tactics that do more harm than good… OR, they offer up sound advice and tell you it’s for the search engine’s benefit, but really it’s for the benefit of humans. Sometimes, they just don’t know the difference.
Many SEO firms are well intentioned, and many offer good advice. I just wish they would call themselves Usability Experts or Human Readable Optimization firms.
Let’s break down some of the most common and effective tactics listed above:
- Domain names: This is really simple. If you have a site about the environment, using the word “environment” in your domain name will be helpful to the people visiting your site. It helps them understand who you are and what you’re about. Now, if you’d like to use your brand name instead, fine. It won’t hurt you because your brand name is also an important keyword to you and your visitors. Simply use the best domain name you can get that makes the most sense to your audience and stick with it. Promote it, use it, share it, and link to it. There’s no need to fuss about the search engines here.
- using keyword phrases that your users will be searching on: The SEO guys have it backwards here. What they saying, basically, is if you want to rank higher with the word “environment”, use the word environment in your content. Well don’t be daft! The bigger point is; write useful content about the environment and those interested will find you.
- using keyword synonyms: Well, this is true, but not because it satisfies the search engines. Do this because it satisfies humans, and makes for good reading.
- the <title> tag: Lots is written about this. The <title> tag is basically your pages title (as obvious as that sounds). The title shows in the very top of your browser, and in bookmarks, and the clickable title in search engines, and when in the taskbar (for windows users). The title is pretty important. You’d be pretty surprised how many sites out there have one title for every single page. This is bad. When bookmarking more than one page, it’s impossible to differentiate them unless you have different titles on each page. It’s best to make individual titles for each and every page and ensure your title describes the page (it’s a title, after all). As for the title itself, I’m of the opinion that the more detailed parts of your title should come first, followed by the section and site name. For example, on a fictional shoe retail site (called ShoeStore), a good page title could be “flip flops – Men’s shoes – ShoeStore”. It should be short and it often mirrors or echoes the pages breadcrumb trail.
- the <h1> tag: The <h1> tag is designed to be the pages Headline, so in my previous fictional ShoeStore example, the page should have an <h1>Flip flops</h1> tag. The H1 is useful because many screen readers look for it and it’s just generally a best practice to use it and designers can make it look any way they like using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Search engines treat the content inside H1′s with higher priority since they tend to declare the contents subject or persona. Over use of the H1 tag can be detrimental. When everything is important, nothing is.
- use keywords in links: Do this because it is just good web-writing. Here’s an example:
- Bad: I found an interesting story about the New Brunswick flood. Click here to see it.
- Good: I found an interesting story about the New Brunswick flood.
- The first example must interrupt the flow of the sentence to offer up the “click here” part, where the second example simply makes the text clickable at the most appropriate time. This is good writing for the web. We shouldn’t interrupt the reader just to offer a link, when it’s not necessary. The SEO experts agree with me, but for different reasons. They say you should hyperlink your text with keywords. Often you’ll end up doing exactly the same thing. See? In my second example “the New Brunswick flood” would be considered important keywords.
- Keyword Density: Write lots of original content and you’ll never need to worry about keyword density! This is why Blogs are so powerful. If you have a blog, and you’re updating it regularity, then you’ll have lots of words on your site in no time. This is great. Search engines like this, because humans like this! We like to read, we like to read interesting and original content. If you have that on your site, the search engines will recognize that and make your content searchable.
- Meta Description tags: The description of your page is important because it gives a clue to the search engines what’s on your page. Some use them, some do not.
- URLs: Whole books could be written on URLs. But it all boils down to making them short and human readable. Why? Because we’re human; we like to share. Short and readable URLs are easy to email or instant message or twitter or dictate over the phone! We’ve all seen URLs that are long and ugly with lots of parameters and values. They break when you email them, and they’re just hard to work with. Yuk. Short and human readable are key!
Sadly, there are lots of examples of “black hat” Search engine optimization (SEO) companies and tactics out there, and even sadder still, lots of companies are paying good money to these companies.
So, you may have noticed a general theme here…
SEO = Usability
SEO tactics are really Human Readable and Usability tactics. Period. That’s why I fundamentally believe that SEO is really bullshit, and we should focus on Human Optimization (but what company would want to call themselves HO experts?).
In fact, I hope this page is a good example. When google “sees” this page, it extracts the following taxonomy (the numbers behind each term indicate a weighting score, of sorts)
search engine optimization (60)
search engine marketing (14)
search engine ranking (12)
search engine position (11)
search engine rank (8)
search engine submission (7)
search engine (41)
internet marketing (5)
optimization (8)
seo (19)
website (7)
So, these are the terms that Google extracts from this page. Pretty accurate, I’d say. All that without special attention to “SEO tactics”. I wrote this page for humans.
awesome read, dude. i couldn’t have said it better myself.