daryn's tumblelog

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.

mikehudack:

First it was don’t send out press releases and now it’s don’t use SEO. It’s like marketing is somehow dirty because it’s only used to “make up for a bad product.”

Bullshit. Marketing is important. Even the best products need to be marketed. Google had marketing and PR departments. Say what you will about About.com, but it was a great business and it was simply SEO. SEO was the product.

While some people may be religious about it, as you say, I reblogged because I don’t believe you should pay an “expert” to help you with it. The basics of SEO are simple enough for anyone to learn, and they get you 80% there with minimal effort. Chasing the remaining 20% can take up time better spent improving your product.

I’m with Mike. It’s so easy to trivialize marketing, especially if you’re in product development or engineering, but that’s bullshit. I don’t care how good your product is, if you don’t make an intelligent and concerted effort to promote it, you’re going to have a much harder time succeeding.

The basics of anything are simple to learn. The “O” in SEO stands for optimization, which inherently implies an ongoing plan, and a level of expertise beyond minimal best practices. Whether you pay for it, or someone else does, the research needs to be done, and the results can be very valuable. Take the work that Etsy has done with SEOmoz for example: there’s a lot of fine tuning there that you can say was obvious, but it took significant time to dig through site hierarchy, page hierarchy, and keyword analysis, among other things, to come up with that strategy. Yes, you can do it yourself - for the most part we do - but beyond the commitment to keep the basics in mind with every change you make to your product, it takes a significant time commitment to keep up with the research that is being done.

In a highly competitive space, getting 80% there might as well be getting 0% there. The remaining 20% is what can get you into those first few search results, and make a world of difference.