According to Eoghan McCabe SEO is Bullshit. He posted a little rant about it here.
But today I think he went a little too far by basically manipulating a response from Dave Davis of RedFly to make it suit his opinion, without delving deeper into fact.
At some levels I agree with him, SEO can be bullshit at times, especially when the search results are filled with spamming websites. However, Google do a pretty good job (although not as good as they used to) of removing a lot of the spamming resuts. Other search engines such as MSN and Yahoo have a long way to go before they can match the techniques used by Google to eliminate these nasty results.
He does have one valid point, that if web designers coded their sites properly from the beginning, there would lesser need for an SEO’er to get your site ranking on the search engines. A great example of this would be the SEO work we are currently doing for a Irish Mortages Broker. The site was created by David Behan and he did a fantastic job. Because of the competitiveness of this market, we have a lot of off-site work to do, but the majority of on-site work was done by the designer. If the market wasn’t so competitive, the site would definitely have appeared in the top results. However, in this case, there is a lot more work to be done. So what did we do for the client? Researched keyphrases, made small changes to the website and managing their off-site optimisation.
The bottom line is simple, there will always be gangsters out there trying to jump on a new hyped business, no industry is different. When crunch comes to crunch, the good people will come out on top. If you want to achieve results with your website, SEO is an avenue that you should seriously consider.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your comments. Really appreciate it. What I’m trying to do here is stir up some debate and get the online community to talk about what I’m hearing at every web conference and event I go to, time and time again. I’m not the only person that believes this. You writing about it here is a very valuable addition to the conversation.
Anyway, I just want to pull you up on one thing: your accusation about me “manipulating a response from Dave Davis” is undeserved. I did no such thing and presented his great responses in full and unedited (save for two paragraphs at the end that were not direct answers to my questions that I was unable to squeeze into the post). Dave told me to “feel free to go to town on my replies”.
Eoghan
Hi Eoghan,
Well that’s where we’ll have to disagree so. Looking at it from where I’m sitting, you picked and chose which elements of Dave’s response to highlight.
You brushed over the important facts and focused on the bad.
Tom