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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

37Signals writes the way they do exactly for this reason. So other people will retaliate and reference them. They make everyone else look like they are just playing catch-up with 37Signals which makes them a constant leader by default. You have to hand it to them for this bit of brilliance.

However, I don't doubt that they are "planning" on writing another post next week that looks at a common business practice from the completely opposite direction. Then a thousand bloggers will write about how wrong they are.

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Nicely deconstructed. They're definitely using SEO on a deeper level.

I think the term you're looking for is 'trolling'.

We've already established that they're trolling. The real question is whether they've set out to increase their page rank through those means, on purpose. They are a business, after all.

Call me naive, but I believe 37sigs want also to change how american small businesses operate. It's not just trolling they really want to change how certain people think.

Having a valid opinion that is against the grain is not "trolling". Innovation isn't trolling.

Well really, trolling isn't trolling when it's done by a for-profit business...

At that point we start calling it by fancy terms like brand awareness, or, in general, marketing.

Aside from that, who is trolling more here? 37signals for writing the original article? Or this bplans guy, to whom we are paying attention only because he picked a fight with 37signals?

That's not the same as writing in an intentionally inflammatory manner to garner attention and get responses. There's a difference between your opinion and how you choose to convey it. For me, trolling is entirely a question of the latter and not the former.

That's not SEO (Search Engine Optimization). That's SEM (Search Engine Marketing) aka link-building/trolling/link-baiting/viral marketing... whatever you want to call it, it's about putting compelling content on your site that gets passed along on its own merits attracting links.

SEO is done on-site and is a process of organizing your information architecture so it is search-engine-friendly, and then creating content that is relevant to your target market. That way you can get indexed for the terms you want, so that you appear on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) exposing you to your target market at their time of need.

Once that's done, SEM begins which is about attracting off site links that get you ranked high on those SERPs so you get traffic. (There's another side of SEM that's about PPC.)

SEO and SEM go hand-in-hand, but they are still two different things. (Not being snarky, just pointing something out. I'm an online marketer and client education is the biggest challenge of my field.)

Interesting distinctions. I guess I misunderstood the term SEO when I first heard it. If optimization refers to rearranging your content so that search engines can parse it more easily, then I can see where you're coming from. I thought it referred only to the end result, i.e. improving your site's rank. Thanks for the correction.

You're right in your definition. SEO (search engine friendly design, link building, etc.) is a subset of SEM. SEO is about improving your organic (non-paid) search results. SEM generally refers to a combination of SEO and PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, and other online marketing methods.

That said, I think things like the 37 signals post are too easily classified as SEO when it's really just publicity seeking with no real intent on improving the sites rankings.

That's a semantic quibble which I don't think adds a ton to the conversation. Besides that, it might just be WRONG. Just about every SEO professional I know would include copywriting, linkbait AND markup under the umbrella of SEO.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing )

"Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.[1]. The industry peak body Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), also includes search engine optimization (SEO) within its reporting, but SEO is a separate discipline with most sources, including the New York Times defining SEM as 'the practice of buying paid search listings'.[2][3]"

http://is.gd/16x87 (GoogleFight! ;-) )

http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engi... (intro to SEO article which talks about linkbait).

Note: Not being snarky. I've been an online marketer and spoken on SEO. I think client education is important-- but we should focus on what's important and not the subtleties of acronyms.

My clients are usually more apt to talk about subtleties of acronyms than I. I'm glad you fought back a little though, you have a great point. I'd prefer to take the term SEO out back and have it shot, personally. I'm a bigger fan of findability, a la http://www.alistapart.com/articles/findabilityorphan/

I'm certain they like the side-effect of getting links from both sides of whatever fence they put up this week, but it could just be a nice side-effect, rather than the goal.

I'm similar in the way that when I make an argument for something, I don't like to soften it up with various "but it depends on", "your mileage may vary", listing various other methods that might work better in other situations, and so on.

I also think it's refreshing to have people actually take a stand for something — whether I agree with it or not. I'm tired of bland semi-advice that's watered down to go over well with everybody.

sorry to burst your bubbles people, but i don't think this was intentional. i don't think this was some genius marketing strategy that 37signals came up with, although maybe it is working in their favor. it's just over-reaction to over-planning is all, a slip, and not brilliance. read the guy's twitter page, and blog, this post is nothing extraordinary, so either he is a genius writer who can break into marketing with ease and mimic casualness on a regular basis, is a generated persona entirely, or just happened to say the wrong thing and 37signals already was talked about all the time, and thus this.

I keep checking out 37signals products because people make a fuss about it, so it's working, except I can't see what anyone sees in them.

They seem to over-react to most time-tested business practices, which is why I think it's all part of the plan. People know that they will look at things differently, and then advise that it's a good way of doing business with their only data being compiled from their internal successes.

Their marketing is brilliant. Do the same thing many successful others have been doing for years, brand it, and spin the hell out of it. Imagine how successful they'd be with a good name.

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