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Comment by babel17 | Hacker News Reader

Great story. I gotta ask though, how can ANYONE love SEO ??

As the writer of the story, I guess I should answer this.

I think the acronym "SEO" feels a bit outdated. The problems and strategies involved in SEO are far more involved than it often gets credit for. There are a number of people who do the name a disservice and do bad SEO.

But the type of work I do at Distilled is working on incredibly creative projects.

It might include projects like managing domain consolidation across 3 domains comprising of pages in the millions without allowing for a massive drop in traffic. To solving speed optimization issues, to account for crawl budgets that limit indexation. Or determining IA on large scale sites. Or helping optimize a site running on a 16 year old CMS that won’t switch.

And in the same day, I may switch gears to brainstorm some of the most popular viral content on the internet. Then I'll work with a client on their customer service center problems, because it's leading to reputation issues online.

Then later that week, I'll be on the phone with the CEO of a cool startup talking through strategic business ideas.

I get to help work on strategies that fall well outside the acronym of "SEO" that help lead to the success of some great brands.

As an ex engineering, math, and science fanatic - I love the problems that force me to just sit in front of a whiteboard for 2 days straight until I come out with a solution I think will work best for a client.

I love the complexity of the problems. However, in the industry, I'm more known for "building links" which is the aspect that allows me to be creative. Also, my "hustle" has made me successful at getting my clients coverage. But in link building, you get to work on projects like data mining and analysis on client data to create interesting content. Then I get to take that same content and pitch it to publications. It's such a dynamic process for one content piece to cover everything from brainstorming concepts, to data analysis, to outreach.

So yeah, I love SEO.

I'm one of the founders of Distilled (mentioned in the story) and I also come from a technical background (maths mainly). The thing I love about SEO is that we get to work on harder problems in more fun ways than any other industry I've come across. You can make it whatever you want - Justin is a great example of this.

And, yeah, he rocks - but you all worked that out already.

In some ways, I'd like to keep SEO's awesomeness a secret from the HN and startup community.

As a developer (I'm not a engineer or computer scientist), I love to build stuff and see people use it. If you build things that are usable by Googlebot (as in, easy to crawl, easy to perceive the content's quality, easy to categorize and associate with keywords) and worthy of citations (links), then your reward can be astronomical...

My last site was a SEO-driven UGC site and I sold it for $10M before I turned 32. I never paid a dollar for marketing, I was the only owner, and I never had more than 5 employees. And with my help, it doubled in revenue after I sold it. It was a fantastic business. Now I'm pretty much free to work on what I like.

It's like that with a lot of things I suppose - you make it what you want. For a while I scoffed at "SEO" but my cofounder dragged me into starting a company and before I knew it I had more interesting engineering problems to solve (still do) than I could shake a stick at and I'm having fun.

Really good to get this type of perspective on modern "SEO", so thanks, Justin.

I was wondering if you can point me towards any resources (books, articles, tutorials, etc.) that embody more of the interesting and worthwhile side of internet marketing and less of the "sleazy" side of SEO?

Obviously there's nothing better than putting things in practice (and that's in the pipeline), but would appreciate any pointers from someone who knows what they're talking about :)

I hope this doesn't seem self serving, but seomoz.org has some of the highest quality information you can find on SEO. In addition to that, I'd suggest articles on http://searchengineland.com/ - they offer high quality content and news in the industry. Anything written by Vanessa Fox on SEL is usually great.

Guides like Excel for SEO shows some of the basic stuff we do: http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/

For high level patent / research based SEO, nobody does it better than http://www.seobythesea.com/ (his URLs are ugly, but his content is great)

For specific beliefs on how the algo works, this is a good resource: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

SEOmoz has webinars and a PRO Q&A. Distilled.net also offers videos of our conferences.

As for books, the best I've read are Art of SEO, which is co-written by Rand, and SEO Secrets by Danny Dover (formerly of SEOmoz, now at AT&T) which talks more about the consulting side. The problem with books is that stuff can go out of date quickly. If you're reading a book that talks about PageRank sculpting, for example, it's dated.

Other great sites:

http://www.seobook.com/ - high level opinions and analysis of industry issues

http://www.seroundtable.com/ - recap of industry news and forums

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ - lots of tactical articles

Things I've written for example:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/how-user-data-may-reorder-...

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/breaking-down-the-mormon-s...

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/building-your-own-scraper-...

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/impact-of-google-instant/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/replace-yahoo-linkdomain-with-goo...

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guide-to-competitive-backlink-ana...

Hope that helps! :)

It does indeed! Bookmarked and tweeted, thanks again :)

So since SEO has such a bad rep, and you're not just updating meta tags and H1s – why call it SEO? Just wondering. Is it because the common business owner knows he needs "SEO"?

This is a debate SEOs have.

Rand wrote an interesting post on the topic this week: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-responsibilities-of-seo-have-...

There is still the point that my work is done through the lens of improving organic search traffic. Google has just changed to include so many factors, it's much closer to just building a great inbound or web strategy. There are also details that are search specific, that it helps having someone on top of those details, because they can have major impacts. So, at least for now, SEO still works as a title, especially when that's the service people know they need.

I find it equally frustrating that there are people out there pitching meta tag optimization as "SEO" and reducing the perceived value of what I do for a living.

And it's still possible to manipulate the search engines, and lots of companies do it, but that's not actual marketing.

Thank you for your answer (I wasn't really expecting any). I suspected that there must be more to SEO than meets the (ignorant) eye if it does indeed instill such love :-)

I've loved SEO with every fiber of my being for close to a decade. It's an absolutely phenomenal field filled with complexity, challenges, rewards for creativity, attention to metrics and execution. It's hard to find or imagine a business endeavor that produces such remarkable return, nor one that has so many interesting elements (the detective work of uncovering why a site's rankings went up/down, the excitement of a content marketing play, the variety of tactics that can be used to approach a challenge).

How can anyone NOT love SEO? That's the more salient question.

As an engineer building an SEO company, I can think of plenty of reasons NOT to love SEO. Every coin has two sides (which is, effectively, what I said in the other comment) :)

Generally speaking, I agree with you. I down voted though because it's a silly statement to make when you really think about it in a more dynamic way:

  * Perspective is subjective
  * SEO isn't everything you think it is

I'm an engineer and I'm actually building an SEO company; "SEO" (I really hate that acronym) is many different things. For some people it's a slimy practice, for other people it is marketing but on the internet ("Internet Marketing" and "SEO" pretty much go hand in hand these days).

You might even be interested to know that YC funded an SEO startup (http://www.ginzametrics.com) - they are an SEO tools company (my competitor).

So, can you love SEO? Sure you can, as an engineer, building useful SEO tools is rife with fun and interesting problems. Just gotta change your perspective a bit.

BUT I agree with you in that on a big philosophical whole, SEO is not something I will be doing my whole life; matter of fact I see it as a stepping stone to interests that matter to my spirit and not just my intellect (interesting engineering problems) and my ego (money and stuff).

It has visible short to medium turn returns? I don't do SEO, but it seems like it's a case where you can do some analysis, engineering and tuning, then fairly immediately see some results.

Beats the pants of slower cycle stuff where you need to work for months on the assumption that all your planning and resourcing will actually produce something that is sustainable.

I have the same impression about SEO and also about a lot of other things. While I was in college, I thought web development was easy and for people who couldn't program in C/C++. I was dumb. Now i know otherwise. It can be the same with SEO. And that's beside the point, the story is about determination and hard work. What he chose to do is a sidenote.

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