QOTD › Dashing SEO

28 July 2004 @ terribly early in the morning | Comments (0)

“...the SEO industry does need to learn that its real business is in helping clients make information that’s compelling enough that potential customers want to find it. Once they’ve created that information, it behooves them to make it as accessible and sharable as possible, and to provide affordance for easily keeping it up to date.”

– Anil Dash : Optimizing Search Engine Optimization

Speaking from experience, I would agree that the primary downfall of the SEO industry as a whole is neglecting to thoroughly understand web technology and its potential power when applied appropriately.

You don’t take your Camaro to your neighbor, a lawn-mower repairman, in order to install a modified chip and larger exhaust system. The technologies are similar only in that they both use combustion engines – and the resulting consequences would be quite dire. Your car could end up with sharp rotating blades underneath the front bumper.

Strange (borderline pointless) analogies aside, proper markup ensures proper information hierarchy. Proper information hierarchy ensures search engines will find and catalog your information according to its intended usage.

This, obviously, still does not address establishing a website’s link popularity. Therein lies the crux of why most SEO “consultants” rely on refer spamming, keyword stuffing, cloaking, link farms, and a myriad other despicable tactics that contribute to the industry’s poor reputation.

I am quite pleased to see Anil Dash win this competition, if not for simply demonstrating the power of standards-based web development in combination with a strong social network that shares a common goal.

[update -› 09 August 2004]

Derek K. Miller just wrote a quality article debunking the snake oil that is SEO: Boosting your search ranking: it’s no trick.