The Inconvenient Truth About SEO

Rather than optimizing only for the latest trend, it'd tremendously help to provide content people are looking for.

Google usually is quick in weeding out fluff, of course it also helps to have a sane URL-structure without keyword-overload and maybe naming images appropiately - not only for the added benefit of SEO (Image Search comes to mind) but at the same time you provide some context for people with screen readers...

Following basic accessibility concepts, providing some context to pure image content go a long way and should be done for the sake of the visitors to the site and not SEO.

edit: Now that i've read the article from Google Cache i realize all my points have been raised there too - so, 100% agree..

Excuse me, but what do you agree with? Do you think that it is enough to write any arbitrary bold statement and then say something in the lines of 'I know that sounds like an extreme position blabla' to make it sound more credible and less pompous? Do you realize that author of this article completely mistake some elementary SEO for content development plan/strategy? SEO has evolved, you know? These two things are not mutually exclusive, they should go hand in hand if you're going to have any kind of traffic before your business dies.

This whole article is trying to somehow prove that SEO is definitely not caring for you users, but writing content (what does it even mean?) magically is! Ignoring the reality of search engine ranking algos may help you build some kind of cool image if you are famous or lucky, but it doesn't necessarily need to help your business. If you're in a business, writing good content for the sake of writing good content is nonsense (it's worse, actually, because it costs you money).

As to your suggestion: I've seen pure ads being both much better and much worse than pure content building, but this is really comparing apples to oranges. Careful testing is your best friend here, and I'd say that you can always implement both strategies of building traffic without mixing them too much: have pages with great (and optimized) content, and have landing pages built specifically for ad-driven traffic.

Ads help, sure. But it's bad advice to tell people to do that FIRST. There are other ways to get on top. For your restaurant example people should try to use Google's services to the max: add the restaurant to Google places for Business so that you get on Google maps and street view, get a Google+ account and post some pictures of the food, client comments and special events, post special events on a public Google calendar. Even have a Facebook and twitter account as they play nice with Google rankings, especially Facebook pages. Even one post a week is effective. There are lots of things a small business can do before even touching their websites code. After that you add Google analytics and then as a last resort you buy ads.

Last month we removed all ads because our REAL content is much more efficient. So, we basically try to create more content in less time and we are selling more in this way.

Yikes, check this out: http://sweet.io/admin/postview/