A while ago I wrote a blog post on SEO and it attracted some controversy, probably more than my notes on how frustrating Amazon simpledb is or how good the food is in China.

Anyways Vanessa Fox – a former product manager for Google Webmaster Central responded to my post – pointing out that I don’t pay attention to engagement.

This is probably true, engagement muddies up the water somewhat. Even though SEO can land you an audience of millions of visitors, maybe those visitors don’t actually buy your products or leave insightful comments or do whatever you want them to do.

However it’s hard to argue with millions of hits, because there is always going to be a percentage that do something. And some percentage will be something that you want. So from that perspective, my position is that millions and millions of hits are a pretty nice thing to have, because at the very least you can stick Adsense on your pages and get money, which is also a nice thing.

The reason I think this method of drumming up traffic is on the whole harmful to the internet as a medium is because the activity of making your content look good for a bot is not necessarily tied to making your content good period. The internet should ideally be about people making good content and visitors reading and engaging in that content.

Google is setting up a game however where it rewards content that looks good to algorithms instead of people. In response, money and effort is going into making content that looks good to those algorithms. I’d point to the company Mahalo who auto-generates crap for humans but good for algorithms pages for potential search terms, or the endless link begging and social network spamming that’s going on, or bloggers censoring their naughty words to avoid getting the dreaded adult flag, or lots of stuff that Google says is good if you want their referrals. And because of Google’s monopoly on searches and people’s natural inclinations to search, they are by far the biggest game in town.

I’m actually now ambivalent on the subject as a developer. On one hand starting from scratch it can be very unnatural to develop for SEO, on the other hand, since many people don’t understand it, it’s now a competitive advantage for me since I can get Google traffic that other sites don’t know how to get.

OK let me just respond to some points from Vanessa:

Google does think having your site name in your page title is a good idea. Of course you want your company name in your title and it makes no sense at all that Google wouldn’t also want you to be found in searches for your company name. But take Google out of the equation for a minute and think of your customers. They’re searching for something. Using words. ... If your store is called “Buffy’s Store” then how the hell do you expect those people driving by to have any idea what you store might contain? You sit there, with your brushes and your rollers and your five gallon buckets and you wonder where everyone is. Then try changing your sign to “Buffy’s Paint Store” and see if your customer traffic patterns improve.

The problem is that the vast majority of searches don’t care that much about the store, they care about the product. And if Google sees a page called “Buffy’s Paint Store” and a page called “Paint Store” – it will think that Paint Store is a better match for what people are probably searching for, which is “paint store”. And since Google rewards domain names very highly, searches for “buffy’s paint store” will match against your domain “buffys-paint-store.com” and you will get those kind of searches anyways.

The bottom line is this. Yes, if you want your customers to find you using search, then you have to understand search engine optimization. And you should want your customers to find you using search because search is the entry point on the web. But if you are operating an online business, you absolutely should understand online marketing. I don’t understand people who say it should all just work and they should be able to concentrate on their core business.

My premise is that the internet would be better off if people could just focus on their core business and let people beat a path to their door. Maybe it’s not realistic, but SEO just isn’t natural, it’s an algorithm. If marketing is necessary it should be about telling people about your product, not trying to decipher the needs of an opaque algorithm.

Let me extend Vanessa’s analogy of a brick and mortar store. Imagine you open your store, and you put no signs up advertising it. Yeah that would be dumb. Well let’s say you put up a sign and some people start coming to your store. But then you notice a giant robot flying overhead who can deliver a billion people, but to get those people you have to spend your time deciphering its ever changing code of strange demands: paint your store purple, and get your neighboring stores to point signs at you, and make sure your store is in at the same location for 6 months, and don’t change the name of your store, etc. That could get pretty frustrating.

Anyways thanks for the response Vanessa, pretty soon this will all be a moot point when Googlebot gains self awareness and removes the pesky humans from the planet.

(edit:hosting datacenter suffered a data loss and this post was lost – im restoring it)