How does your site fare in the search engines? Have you ever thought of hiring a search engine ‘expert’ to improve your site’s search engine positioning?
Friend of mine, web designer-developer, SEO consultant and all-round good guy, Eggman John (who from now we’ll just call John) recently posted an article outlining seven reasons why you don’t need SEO. John’s article caused a bit of a stir amongst the SEO community, but there is a lot of sense in what he says.
To summarise, these are John’s seven arguments:
- You don’t need ‘link building’, you need great content which people want to link to all by themselves.
- You don’t need ‘content optimisation’, you need a great writer for all your site’s copy (a copy writer).
- You don’t need ‘viral content creation’, you need a head of marketing who’s read Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’.
- You don’t need ‘internal link analysis’, you need a web designer who codes your navigation right the first time.
- You don’t need ’server side rewrites for keyword optimisation’, you need a web developer who knows his stuff and understand what will work best for the end user.
- You don’t need ‘alt attribute and header tag implementation’, you need a web designer who codes semantic markup and adheres to modern web standards.
- You don’t need ‘landing pages’, you need enough content on all your existing pages to talk about all the different aspects of your industry.
To get a clearer picture of what John is saying, head over to his original post, and make sure you read the comments that follow - it’s an enlightening read.
Ultimately though, John is not arguing that SEO is a load of baloney - remember, he’s an SEO consultant and makes money from the business. However, to an extent SEO consultants are making their money completing other people’s work. It should be unnecessary.
The are a massive amount of web developers out there releasing sites out into the wild without paying the slightest heed to search engine optimisation. If every developer adhered to recommended web standards and followed best practice then half the battle would already be won. SEO shouldn’t be an afterthought or a bolted-on extra service, it should be standard procedure and weaved into the very fabric of every site from day one of its life.
The other point that John makes is that content is, of course, king. If those responsible for content are populating your well-built site with high quality and relevant content, then you really don’t need SEO.
Do you think search engine optimisation is necessary?
Do you think John’s arguments make sense, or do you think they undermine an important and valuable industry? If every site was built with SEO in mind and developed to high standards, would we still need SEO consultants?
4 fantastic comments
John’s list isn’t so much “7 reasons why you don’t need SEO” as “7 things which aren’t SEO and which aren’t necessary if your website was written and coded properly first time round”. That said, it’s an excellent list.
What this gets at is that there are many, many people who have gone (or have been led) down the wrong path when they got their website: non-semantic markup, poor content, etc. If someone fixes (or simply reworks) these problems and calls it SEO, how is the client to know otherwise?
I agree with most of the post but think the title is misleading.
I would still consider the mentioned points to be SEO, whether they are implemented by the web designer (they should be) or an ‘SEO Consultant’ afterwards.
So therefore SEO is necessary, it just should be part of good web design and not an expensive extra. It’s amazing how many new clients come to me telling me that they can’t find their site in Google when just a couple of minor changes gets them listed within days. I’ve had 2 come to me with title tags displaying ‘Untitled Document’ !!!
@Tracey - What the client should know is that if they have paid for someone to fix their site’s problems, then someone earlier down the line hasn’t done their job properly. Client’s shouldn’t need to hire consultants to fix a designer-developers shoddy work.
@Shaun - Is it a misleading article title? Er, yeah, sorry about that… To be clear, I’m not knocking SEO, of course SEO is absolutely vital for driving organic traffic to any site. I’m knocking the countless designer-developers who are pumping sites out that just aren’t up to standard. The techniques which collectively we call SEO are necessary, but SEO as a service shouldn’t be - it should be an integral part of every conscientious designer-developers processes. Which I guess is exactly what you’re saying.
ps - I had one of those sites today too
Hi Aaron, thanks for the link and the follow up!
Some great comments too - I think they were referring to my title being misleading though, but let me put it like this, if I’d titled it “7 reasons why you should get seo right the first time and maybe not pay very much for an overpriced seo consultant” - would my post have been as successful as it was?
The point of the article wasn’t as linkbait, or for the sake of a load of traffic - but I write my articles to be read by as many as possible, if that means I have to create a click-friendly title, then I don’t really have a problem with it. I don’t think I’m the only guilty party for that little trick 
What are your thoughts?
