Why SEO is not a job | Hacker News Reader

Why SEO is not a job

dotnetbutchering.blogspot.com

20 pointsnreece15 comments

A job is anything someone will pay you to do, and as long as there are companies that will pay employees to help them achieve better results on Google, SEO is and will remain a job.

From the article: "Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime (sic)"

True. Anyone can also be a great cook and keep a house clean in their spare time, but that doesn't mean chefs and housekeepers don't have "real jobs."

I'll agree that there are a lot of overpaid SEO "consultants" who do nothing more than add META tags and ALT attributes and get paid $100+/hr to jerk off the rest of the time. However, speaking as an ex-employee of a company who has 3 results on Google's first page for "health insurance," there are legitimate companies out there who would drown if they didn't have SEO experts working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.

the article is obviously a provocation - we all know what a job is a what is not. SEO consultants have an horrible reputation and this is the direct result.

"Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime"

That is something that always gets me. How can easy (implied) be a meaningful term for anything that is competitive. This is not like run a mile in x minutes (if x is big enough, anyone can do it), This is like run a mile faster then everyone else. By definition, not everyone can do it.

"The most sophisticated SEO strategy I've ever heard about is "remember to provide a back link whenever you put a link on you[sic] website". What's this, if not a joke."

The joke being that the author feels qualified to make a blog post on a subject they clearly haven't researched. Even assuming they meant "request a backlink for every link you put on your site" it's nonsense advice with just enough truth to it for it to seem credible that the author actually has received this as advice. It's like a networking consultant advising you to throw handfuls of your business cards into the crowds at conferences.

The SEO industry has more incompetent individuals than some industries who claim expert status but we shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush. There are SEOs out there sufficiently knowledgeable to make a real difference to the profitability of businesses. As dandelany says, as long as that is true companies will continue to, happily, pay them.

This is a terrible article. I completely disagree with the sentiment. As Dan stated, just because you could do it yourself doesn't mean it's not worth hiring someone else to do it.

Of course there are simple things that make a difference. Keyword density, whether you strong/emphasize your keywords, use it in titles, duplicate content, the type of hierarchy and organization on your site, and of course: backlinks.

And how about analyzing what keywords are driving traffic to your blog, so you can see where you rank, and modify your own internal backlinks and perhaps change the text on the page so that it ranks higher for keywords it already ranks for?

These are all additional, mundane tasks that do NOT fall in the realm of "just writing it." So what, if I just write a blog these will all magically take care of themselves? No, of course not, These are "search engine OPTIMIZATIONS" because you take the time to review your own work and optimize it.

So, I am in agreement that anybody "could" do it, just like anybody "could" do their own taxes. Are we going to see H&R Block go down anytime soon? Unlikely.

I've met more than a few fraudulent SEOs, but you cannot support this generalization merely because their are a few bad apples in the cart. Every profession has its share. I've also met some invaluable SEOs, especially in the magazine and publishing businesses, that thrive in large corporations as the bridge between the editorial staff and the tech team. These people can be characterized as smart, undervalued and overworked - as they often perform a largely thankless job that has direct impact on the bottom line. In many cases, these people are as close to a starter upper that you'll be able to find in otherwise stagnant labor pools.

I've also met some invaluable SEOs, especially in the magazine and publishing businesses, that thrive in large corporations as the bridge between the editorial staff and the tech team.

Are these people really SEOs, people who optimize only for search engines, or are they UI designers, who make the site good for its users? If you are making the content good for humans, then you are not an SEO -- making a good site is not SEO, it's making a good site. It will probably be good for your search engine ranking though.

well, in this case i've only met them from my role as a ui designer who's been called in because of a need for ui design. that said - you're very right - given the circumstances, they were the closest position to a ui designer that these companies had. and they do tend to think more about the users than most other roles. their focus was though was on a traffic funnel with a rhythm dictated by crawlers, not the all of general interest. in companies with a strong editorial culture, these people are closer to the literal language of a site & copywriting than us diagrammers. they care about interaction design, but only as long as it's not annoying & isn't something the crawlers would have a problem with. i can't imagine it working in smaller companies with the same dynamics, nor do i think it would work well as a consultancy - but it some cases, it fits the given context extremely well.

I love how there's SEO links in his adsense ... ha

This guy doesn't have a clue. There are a lot of SEO "hacks" out there, but that doesn't de-legitimize the truly skilled people.

I've done a good amount of industry-specific SEO with good success (both for the customer and myself). Not only that, buy I've created educational materiel that let people learn how to do things themselves. So, yes, SEO is a job–in more ways than one.

The point is that you will naturally do well in search engines if your site is useful. You don't need SEO, you need a good site.

If your site is shit, you deserve to have a low ranking, and it's likely that an SEO consultant won't get you a good rank anyway,

No, you do well in search engines if they "think" your site is useful. I'd also argue that "relevant" is a better term than "useful". A site can be extremely useful to humans but not necessarily rank extremely well.

If I could upvote this twice, I would.

I totally agree - most of SEO people are scum

Well, I wouldn't exactly rate them as "scum", but IMO a lot of the SEO stuff is basic "best practices". It's really not magic (or art), just some basic rules to follow.

The majority of the SEO stuff is, to me, similar to what we saw with HTML "programmers" in the mid to late 90's. It's not rocket science, and it's not hard, but it seems to be new and misunderstood by a lot of people.

I agree. I'd say if you have a decent content manager and an average web-designer who can read english and stay up-to-date with todays web-practices SEO consultants are completely useless.

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