Hacker News Reader

Comment by YorkSEO | Hacker News Reader

As an SEO "expert" I take exception to this post, Yes there are a lot of bad companies out there selling snake oil, just like there are in most (all?) industries. That does not mean that all SEO companies are evil and it certainly doesn't mean that all SEO techniques don't work. Lots of people spout the "content is king" mantra, and while i'd agree content is the most important part of a website, you could have the best content in the world, but without SEO, how are people going to find your content and link to it? Unlike the author, most people can't afford to wait 10 years for their site to become popular. The fact is, to get to the top of the results pages you generally need a lot of links, and link building is HARD. This is why every major company has an in house SEO team or hires an agency - because SEO is one of the most effective ways to increase your ROI.

View on HN

I'll give you one thing, at least you're up front about it.

Here's my take on the whole thing:

The www was getting along fine without all the bottom feeders and people 'gaming the system'. Now it's an arms race, and like in any good arms race the people that make the money are the ones selling to both sides.

Poor unsuspecting bystanders in the middle, who still believe that 'content is king' don't stand a chance amidst all that violence.

If all the so called-seos would lose their net access for the next two decades or so I think the quality of the net - and of search engine results - would go up dramatically.

The only reason that google was able to get their foot in the door in the first place was because altavista was too easy to game. Now it's an expert matter, so lots of money is to be made because traffic is 'king'.

Fortunately for me search engines are only a very small %age of my traffic. And no, that does not mean I could be doing a whole lot better if I hired you.

"Fortunately for me search engines are only a very small %age of my traffic. And no, that does not mean I could be doing a whole lot better if I hired you"

No, but increasing your number of search engine visitors would increase your revenue would it not?

It probably would not.

One of the main tenets of SEO is that everybody will profit from traffic from search engines.

Very few people actually take the time to see if that statement holds true for their site.

The major keywords that my site is found on indicate that the users that come through that route are freeloaders, eating up bandwidth and never ever signing up for the premium package.

I can't blame them, I wouldn't either but that's a different story.

Targeting different keywords would be possible but it would require unethical behaviour wrt to building links and I don't go for that. My competitors do, I wish them best of luck.

The users that support the site are not in the hit-and-run category, they've found the site because their buddies are on it, and they stick together.

So, that's why more search engine traffic wouldn't help much, if at all. After all, if (increase-in-sales - (cost-of-acquisition + cost of freeloaders)) leaves you with a net loss then there isn't much point.

And if it would, then I probably would still find using SEO an unethical thing to do.

Maybe that's strange and maybe I should be going all-out to squeeze every last penny out of the internet but I prefer to get my users through references.

He walked into that one, but the fact is, there are many sites that DO get most of their traffic from search engines, and they make a lot of money off of it.

(Spoken as a former SEO who could prove his clients' ROI was well in excess of his substantial consulting fees.)

So, if that were the general case then ALL seos should be able to prove to their clients that their ROI exceeds the consulting fees, in which case they can all work on a no-cure-no-pay basis.

I'm in favor of that pricing model.

Many SEOs have done.

The problem is proving that any change in sales is due to SEO activity and nothing else - "you say our 100% up turn is due to your optimisations but my wife reckons it's my new toupe, now those cable ads are drawing them in droves to the website ...".

If your sector fell by 10% but you only fell 5% did they do a good job?

Without meaning to cause offense, if you get paying customers via referals but not via search engines then i'd argue that theres probably issues with your sales copy. It's your job to convince search engine visitors that your service is worth paying for.

Jacquesm , I suspect you're being inflammatory here.

Part of the SEO on one site I worked on was to optimise to ensure it was better geo-targetted, ie decrease the visitor count from jurisdictions where that site is not valid. Why? Bandwidth but the a result is cleaner SERPs elsewhere. I guess I'm just pure evil?

I do things like name URLs for the content they contain, not /item?id=887743 but /why-not-to-hire-an-SEO - letting people know the content of a link before they click it; evil I guess?

Then there's optimising for speed to improve user retention, gzip enabling, trimming needless scripts and CSS, ... (WW looks like it could be leaner). I consider this part of "SEO".

It's not all bad you know.

And I reckon you could do better ... ;0)>

"you could have the best content in the world, but without SEO, how are people going to find your content and link to it?"

By following common sense, good design, and doing some research and reading about Google's suggestions to web developers.

You shouldn't have to hire someone to tell you what you can find out for free.

Also, you registered just to make this post?

Also, you registered just to make this post?

I would suspect that a fair number of users have registered to make a post, so I'm not entirely certain what you're getting at. (Unless it's just curiosity, in which case I'll allow YorkSEO to speak for themselves).

Ok, what about new companies entering a competitive niche? You can have a perfectly optimised website but still not get any traction in the search engines. These days a good cms will do your on page optimisation for you, but links are what you need to make your site visible. Yes you could build links yourself, but it probably isn't the most efficient use of your time as your success rate will usually be lower than that of an experienced seo. And yes I'm a long time lurker who registered just to post this

Maybe I've misunderstood something about "SEO" as a position (thinking it was all about page optimization/design), but are you saying that its about building incoming links to a site as well?

Do companies hire you just to help build the number of links to their sites from other sites? How do you do this? Isn't that just plain old "marketing" at that point?

Either that or plain old linkspamming.

Yes plenty of companies request linkbuilding only, I'm not going to go into all the details of how we do it, but often its a case of contacting webmasters and asking them to link. Although there are certain techniques we use to increase our success rate which is where marketing aspects come in. In fact most good seo companies are really just online marketers, with seo being an umbrella term for a wide variety of techniques

Then in this case I think the discussion has become one where we use the same term to refer to different things: I've always thought of SEO as "use meta tags, use headlines, use short URLs, etc" - pure optimization of existing contact to help engines better parse your contact.

I'd label what you are referring to as more of online marketing to build a site/brand's presence and reputation, which is something that then influences a search engine ranking.

I could find out for free how to do a lot of things. Make my own whisky, fix my car. However I'm not a distiller or a mechanic so I leave those tasks to people who know what to do without having to read a manual every time. Someone who also knows what not to waste time on(meta tags for example which for some reason still seem to feature high in all entry level seo step lists).

Doesn't your last point about meta tags prove that SEO shouldn't be placed in the same category of "experts" as mechanics and distillers?

I don't see how. My last point was that a lot of the information on this stuff is not helpful. Just like a expert mechanic can listen to an engine and hear problems without having to check every part an expert at SEO can decide which changes are most important without having to go through every checklist and step out there.

No, it's Google's job to help people find things. That's what it does. SEO exists to game Google into placing your site higher in results. I make something, like some small open-source software, put it on GitHub, and it shows up as the first result on Google within hours if you are searching specifically for something like it. I didn't have to hire a SEO.

And it is SEOs job to help Google find things. I'm not going to deny blackhat SEO exists like I wouldn't deny blackhat developers exist but you can't tarnish the whole profession because of your ignorance of the actual role of a whitehat SEO professional.

It shows up in hours on github because github has a lot of authority. It shows up high on google because I'm guessing you're searching for pretty long keyword strings. So if your ok with people finding your code when they search for "ruby gem for mysql connections" thats cool you don't need to hire an SEO professional. Hell you never need to hire an SEO professional. But if you want someone who knows more about it to help you with making sure Google and yahoo and bing can find your information then you can.

I really don't get the hatred on this site for SEO in general. I'm not an SEO professional myself but I know quite a few and now a days most people in the profession that are active and well known are all above board. They help you structure your information to make it easier to find and help you build relationships with other sources of traffic. Hardly evil stuff.

In the same way that marketing exists to game people into buying things? A one word argument, "game", lacks substance.

The goal of SEO, good SEO, is to build a site that caters to both users AND SEs. After all, users make you money, and ignoring one over the other is silly.

A classic example is AJAX. SEs can't pass it, and neither cana lot of users. A "good" designer may know this and buid a site to cater for these users, but how? Will it use forms (invisible to SEs) or an alternate structure?

Sure, a great web designer may "get" all this, but can you be sure? Given that SEs provide the largest, ongoing form of traffic online, why take the risk?

"I make something, like some small open-source software, put it on GitHub, and it shows up as the first result on Google within hours if you are searching specifically for something like it. I didn't have to hire a SEO."

Fallacy of dosage: ranking for a service with little competition is pretty easy. Capturing the whole raft of traffic available on a topic: difficult!!

By following common sense, good design, and doing some research and reading about Google's suggestions to web developers.

Put down the coolaid.

Seriously -- Google is a business. They make money by selling the results of an algorithm. There's nothing magic or sacred about Google's algorithm. It makes mistakes. They blackball people. Even more critical, links are not a necessary and sufficient reason for an article to be the best thing I want to see. It's just a guessing game that works most of the time for most people.

If I had a cure for cancer that worked, and I put it on a website with a new domain tomorrow, and never SEO'd it, who do you think would come by?

Bupkis. Zero. Zilch. Nobody.

Good SEO is marketing. Marketing is a good thing. We need people to do things to bring to our attention stuff we might like. Google is not about to take the place of all marketing -- maybe that was a dream years ago but it's turned out to just be a fantasy on Google's part.

If you found a cure for cancer and only put it on a website, maybe noone would find it.

But if you also mentioned it to a few people (especially a doctor or cancer victim) then it would be featured in news articles, broadcast, tweeted etc. because it's a big deal. Soon your website would appear first in any relevant search.

It might and it might not.

That's the thing -- sure, perhaps all good ideas get great publicity and links simply because they're good ideas.

And perhaps all good business ideas make their owners lots of money simply because they're good ideas.

And perhaps all articles get referenced and linked based on their degree of usefulness to the world.

But in the real world, somebody has to go out and peddle ideas. That's marketing, sales, networking -- whatever you want to call it. Nowadays google is forcing us to go comment on other people's blogs, link-trade, and lord knows what else.

Good ideas simply don't always become popular simply because they're good and you tell a few people. It takes a lot more work than that.

Unless the doctor copied it to their website and told the media about that website instead ... simple isn't it.

Spammer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com