Comment by 3dFlatLander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3dFlatLander | Hacker News Reader

But I use SEO for good.

Then you’re called a Web Developer. Good web development includes using proper formatting (like putting headlines in H tags) and understanding how the web works, search engines included. Valid code also has the side-effect of making your pages more accessible for your users, which is the point. Making your pages more accessible to robots is for robots.

I've been trying to put that idea into words for a while. I visit a lot of forums and freelance sites to prowl for good work, and I see many discussions about page rank, inbound links, three-way links, hosting pages on different IP's to get more PR juice for all of them, etc etc.

It just seems like it's a backwards way of going about things, like building a super highway to a place you hope there may be a city in the future.

Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers.

Just an aside...

Did you just quit smoking or something?

Yes.

I just quit cold turkey.. it sucks. Wish I'd never smoked in the first place.

"Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers."

That's a touch simplistic. Spread the word where? To whom? How?

The issue of getting customers is so complicated that we are all here, reading, learning and coming up with ideas to be a success.

What is "needed" to get customers varies by market, by demographic, by expected return, by quality of product etc etc.

To be a success, a site needs to serve a customer base and then MARKET TO THAT GROUP. SEO may be imperfect, but what SE have is every demographic, identifying themselves clearly, by the keywords they use. Missing out on that traffic is just crazy.

"Good development of a good service and spreading the word about it is what's needed to get customers."

SEO is the catch all term for "spreading the word" on the internet (I do some SEO) - we don't limit it to search engine baiting (!) there is a lot more to it.

One can see things very simply - a bit of widget bait, an active forum, a good product, these can all create great inflows of PR and visitors. Then of course you've to optimise your landing pages, ...

SEO is built into the sites I design/write but there's always more one can do. Good inlinks go a long way.

If you build a store away from civilisation and just wait for customers - you may have an awesome enough product and enough capital to sit it out. But, sending a few flyers, issuing a press release, having promotions, a TV advert, some on-street ads, etc. are all going to help.

Ditto building a website - if you build it and your product is awesome I think it'll get out there eventually (probably as a copycat site by someone who pays for some SEO!?!) but using some PPC, gathering good inlinks, being part of an authority link community, getting blog coverage, getting diggs, etc. are all going to help.

Good web dev does include _some_ SEO. But SEO is too big a field for a web developer to do properly by themselves, a web dev team would have an SEO. Like expecting builders to have painter-decorators, if you want trompe-loeil rather than a slap of magnolia then you're going to need a dedicated expert.

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