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Jan. 11, 2007 at 11:22am Eastern by Danny Sullivan

More Rounds In The "Is SEO Overrated" Debate

The "Is SEO Overrated Or Rocket Science" debate continues. Sigh. OK, I give up. I guess we have to have this every two or three years. All the arguments I'm reading, I've read (or made before). But maybe that's healthy in an industry where you always have new people coming in. I'll give you the rundown on the latest leaders that are weighing in. And yes, it will be a kick-butt debate I'm also going to do for our first Search Marketing Expo this June. Kevin, Todd, Greg, Mike, Jeremy: I'll be coming for you and others! For now, let's see what they and others have been saying.

Yes Virginia, SEO Is Rocket Science - Defending Search Engine Optimization Once Again was my rundown from last month on how the current debate got started, along with many too long arguments from myself on the issue. Well, sometimes I like to rant.

Did-It's Kevin Lee came back into the debate, which I covered in my Defending SEO, Yet Again! article. I was left pretty unconvinced but said I'd hang in there to see what his second part might do.

SEM and SEO: Rocket Science or Just Plain Science? Part2 at ClickZ from Kevin was that second part that came out last week, the one with the numbers. The numbers didn't do that much for me. A higher percentage of people plan to outsource "more than half" PPC spending compared to "the majority" of organic spending. Already, we're picking and choosing different numbers to compare, which concerns me. But I won't drill down into them more now, since relatively few were cited. Instead, I'll make time later to dig into some of these figures myself.

SEO: Art, Science, Bollocks Or What? at ClickZ from Mike Grehan has an organic guy next weighing in -- and weighing in as Mike has done before that "textbook SEO" is dead. Mike and I have done this go around before. Textbook SEO is not useless when you consider how much traffic it can drive in tail terms. I've already covered how my site here doesn't have the reputation to pull in for top terms. But I've also covered how "tail terms" -- generated off textbook SEO -- sent another 3,000 visits that I didn't have to pay for.

I also keep coming back to the fact that what's "textbook" or what's simple seems textbook or simple to people WHO ALREADY KNOW! That's a big chunk of my "Yes Virginia" article mentioned above, and Todd Friesen's article that I'll mention below goes even further.

The Bigger Question of SEO at came out this at SearchDay with John Tawadros of iPropsect -- which does a big amount of organic work along with paid search -- adding his voice. He's mainly pointing out that a search marketing agency does a lot more than tweak a bunch of meta tags.

The SEO Debate Continues from Gord Hotckiss comes in on the side that SEO is going to get harder, less textbook, as personalized results arrive. Yes, I agree. I've written about it for years, with probably the most recent look the one I did on My Yahoo and trust networks here. Part of what I wrote:

We've had a generation of search engines that depended on on-the-page factors such as word location and frequency. We've had a current second generation that tapped into link analysis, looking at how people are linking and what they say in links.

Personal search is that third generational jump, and Yahoo's flavor of personal search is a social network one that it hopes will improve relevancy in web wide results in the way that link analysis helped drive back spam and improve relevancy years ago.

And from my 2004 article on search personalization:

The data is irresistible because as I explained in my Eurekster Launches Personalized Social Search article, it opens hundreds if not millions of fronts in the search engine war against spam. It's hard to spam a search engine when the relevancy may be different for each individual person.

And even from 2001 about Google:

It's possible that Google could examine this datastream in the future, in order to further refine results en masse for all users, via Outride's technology, or to deliver more personalized results to users who desire such customization.

Of course, Google does have personalized results now, if you enroll in them. And they can change the results people see, making the idea of a across the board SEO impact slightly harder. But by and large, people are still seeing pretty much the same stuff. After years of waiting for this to change, I think it's still not going to make a radical change for at least a year or two.

Let's say that does alter, however. SEO hardly dies. We've got local SEO, mobile SEO, video SEO -- you name the vertical, search is spreading everywhere. But hey, it's not rocket science to figure out all these places and determine how they gather and rank content. Just a few hours reading and you're set :)

OnPage SEO Is Garbage Clarification On Rockstars from Jeremy Schoemaker over at Shoemoney has him getting in on the debate action, seemingly to take the "it's bull" view at first but really diving into the reputation problem:

I just feel like whitehat SEO’s are like 21st century car salesmen. Lets cut the bullshit for a minute. I find it funny when a whitehat seo tries to engage me in a debate about seo morals...If blackhat seo is trying to alter the search engines ranking of your website from what would naturally be then your spammy ass urls are definatly not whitehat. Now I am not saying this is wrong but I am saying in my opinion its suspect gray area.

Anyway if you want a real SEO ask them how many blackhat forums or sites they read. If they tell you none then move on. They at least need to be educated in the dark arts even if not practicing.

People are so scared to talk about this in the open for fear they will be associated with “black hats�. Its really interesting because from my years as a security administrator attending all the security conferences the “black hats� are the most respected members there are. Just like SEO it was not always like that. Back in the day if you would associate yourself with hackers or “black hats� then people were scared you would be on the FBI watch list (or now the matt cutts watch list for seo) but NOW in the security world guess who speaks at all the conferences and authors all the books? Its not the whitehat security dumbasses its all the legendary blackhats....

Sigh. I'm sighing on many levels. Part of it is the lack of history. I said we keep going through this debate over and over again. And we do, in so many ways. There is absolutely nothing above that Jeremy is saying that hasn't been said before going back for years. I've read it, participated in it, and it keeps going on as we get a fresh batch of people who get their teeth into the "problem," not realizing the problem really seems to be one that SEO has survived since at least 1998, when we first had calls for certification.

I don't mean to be negative. I like Jeremy -- plus, I'm feeding right into the partial link bait intent of his post, so I'm sure he'll forgive me for some of the traffic and attention I send. And really, as I said, perhaps we do have to have each new generation pushing at this stuff anew.

Anyway, no, you don't have to know blackhat stuff to be a successful SEO. You don't even have to do blackhat. But yes, you might want to understand some of the blackhat stuff. Plus, there's a huge debate over what's even blackhat. That's one reason I've long taken the view that the industry doesn't get anywhere by trying to push off blackhats into some corner and pretending they are bad or you can't talk to them or they have nothing to offer. They are part of the SEO house, and with things like the hijacking issues of 2005, sometimes an incredibly helpful and responsible part.

As for the reputation problem, I've had Jason Calacanis exchanging IMs with me recently -- Jason of the "seo is bullshit" line from when I talked with him last month (and hear it here). Jason was hammering at me. All the big companies hate this stuff. They think you're all slime. You need to dump the name SEO and come up with something new.

Look, all I can tell you is that from what I see and hear anecdotally, plenty of those big companies want the SEO love. In fact, some of them make the problem worse in that they don't seem to care how they get the traffic, as long as they get it. Moreover, they won't do any due diligence of the companies they hire. So they can end up with a blackhat firm that gets them banned. They can end up with a whitehat firm that does nothing. They can end up with a whitehat firm that gets them banned. They can end up with a blackhat firm that does nothing.

With paid search prices going up, SEO is simply going to attract more attention. Plenty of that will mean bringing SEO in house. There's a huge in house SEO community. But good, smart SEO firms are going to do fine.

This takes me over to Shoemoney, A Fish Bowl, and Bullshit from Todd Friesen at his Oilman blog, getting in on the defend SEO action. Let me give you some perspective on Todd. Former blackhat. Former affiliate guy. First debut at SES a few years ago where he was forthright about being Darth Vader-like in his approach. People loved him for his realism, his actual knowledge of the space, and his honesty. People love Greg Boser and Dave Naylor for the same reason. They take you beyond the "how it is supposed to work" and into the "how it really works" area that everyone owes it to themselves to know, regardless of what hat they wear.

Todd now heads whitehat SEO for Range Online Media. He's dealing with big people. He's getting those big companies so supposedly scared or dismissive of SEO. They aren't. He's got a great post talking about the simple and the hard of SEO:

Ok now that we have that taken care of let’s talk about the 95% of SEO that is useless, stupid easy, bullshit or whatever else you want to call it.

I propose this list as the useless and easy SEO tactics:

• Title Tags
• Meta Description Tags
• Meta Keyword Tags
• ALT Tags
• H1, H2, H3 (and accompanying CSS)
• Keywords in the content
• Internal Links (images vs. text (keyword rich))

I propose this list as the 5% of useful and more difficult tasks:

• URL Structure (the fixing thereof)
• Advanced Linking
• Appropriate Cloaking (er…IP Delivery)
• Dynamic Template Modification
• Analytics (I mean useful measurable numbers)
• Client Management (agency life)

First of all I agree that most of SEO is easy but let me qualify that statement. It’s easy for me. It’s easy for Shoemoney. It’s easy for WebGuerrilla and it may be easy for you. Keep in mind we live in a fish bowl and SEO/M is our lives. We live and breath it and have for possibly years and years. It’s become second nature to create unique, keyword rich Title tags and design a web template with H1’s, text navigation and proper ALT tags. It’s what we do and we should be able to do it with our eyes closed and get it right the first time. To say that it’s stupid easy is simply arrogant.

There's more, much more in his post, going on about clients that are improved even with fundamentals, clients that do see this as rocket science:

Go ask the CMO what we did and you may hear terms like rocket science and magic and to that CMO it is rocket science with a huge payoff in revenue.

I also have no doubt that Range (or iProspect or any large firm) charges more than if you were to hire some new person off the street or even a well experienced small company or single person operation. Hey, it's the same work, so they must be overcharging!

I remember Anthony Muller who wrote something like this back in 2001. I love Anthony. He's a great guy, knows his stuff and saw firms charging for stuff he thought was way overpriced. Perhaps. But then again, compared to what? If you're working with small companies, they aren't going to demand a lot of client management. They aren't going to drag you in to do a three hour status update, want regular reports, want handholding and so on. What's overpriced depends on the size of the firm giving the service, the size of the firm receiving it and ultimately the perception of the company overall that buys the service.

For example, I spend an incredibly large amount of money on having my taxes prepared. Living in the UK but being an American means I have do two tax returns for each country -- on different calendars too. TurboTax isn't going to cut it. I use a big firm that I found. I send them large checks. I'm pretty sure if I had the time, I could find an freelance specialist to do my returns for maybe half the amount. But I don't have the time, nor do I have the desire. I love my firm. They do good work, take a worry off my plate and I don't feel I'm overcharged. I'm satisfied.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll spin around again to reexamine the issue, try to bring in some numbers. Meanwhile, read all the article out there. Go ahead and get in the debate yourself. And I'll once again point to my Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO article with more on the flavors of SEO, the reputations issue and so on. It's form 2005, when we last had this debate. But it's still completely relevant and points to even more background over time.

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