This could go on for days:
SEO Guy: I do x, y, and z, how is that bad?
Derek Powazek: X, y, and z isn’t SEO, it’s making good websites.SEO Guys, please change your titles to Good Website Makers. I don’t care why, just do it. Derek Powazek insists.
Posted by Jason Kirk on 12 October 2009 @ 3pm
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Is the very witty comment by Jason Kirk on Derek Powazek’s “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” published October 12th, 2009.
Derek’s intense, absolute position and lack of a shared language with SEO Experts1 leads to little opportunity for real discussion between the parties, but at the heart of Derek’s article is a sentiment shared by many web developers: we are extremely frustration that there continues to be a market for search engine manipulation.
This reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s “All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites“, published 16 March 2005. It makes me think that I’ll happily pay the price of having to put up with SEO Experts, if the alternative is a less flexible and diverse Web.
In my opinion, being an SEO expert only requires 2 skills.
1. The persistence to legitimately build links over time.
2. The ability to make people not leave the website right away.
Having a legitimate looking site interweaves with getting people to link to you. If longevity and keyword content were the only thing that matters with no respect to making a good site, then Google’s top results would always be crappy Geocities pages (RIP Geocities)