PureBlogging

About a week ago, entrepreneur and blogger Jeremy Schoemaker caused a bit of a stir in the SEO community when he said that he doesn’t like 95 percent of SEO experts. It got me to thinking a lot about the whole concept of SEO and search marketing, and how it’s perceived in the online community overall.

I’ll be the first to admit that there are plenty of unethical SEO practitioners out there. Hell, I’ll do more than admit it — I’ll embrace it. There are plenty of people on the Web who perform only the bare minimum required to squirm, limbo-style, under Google’s anti-spamming guidelines. There’s an abundance of optimizers who think the road to high page rank is paved with nothing but keywords. It’s an emerging business based on concepts that are difficult to understand and predict, so it’s certainly going to attract its fair share of jerks. It stinks, and it results in a lot of crappy content taking up bandwidth that could otherwise be used for something more useful, like humorously captioned cat pictures.

But then, I’m new at the SEO game. I’ve been at it for less than a year. I’ve still got plenty to learn about the art and science of optimization. So you should definitely take the things I say with a few shakes of Mrs. Dash.

But here’s the thing I think the SEO haters haven’t seemed to figure out.

At least one blogger who responded to Schoemaker’s assertions seems to claim that companies can easily perform SEO in-house. And overall there seems to be a general feeling that anyone who claims that they can raise your page rank is a snake-oil salesman feeding you a service you could easily do yourself.

Now, the company I work for has a whole list of SEO clients for whom I need to write keyword-rich copy, great meta descriptions and page titles, and attractive PPC ads. Most of these clients are anything but tech-centric: We’ve got building contractors, hotels, hometown pharmacies and paintbrush manufacturers. All great companies with great products. But not exactly the IT crowd.

Something the geek community has never been really good at grasping is the notion that there are people out there who are not geeks, and who have no desire to be geeks. The waste management company I write for isn’t really prepared to run their own Google AdWords campaign. They’re too busy, y’know, collecting people’s trash. Thank God they’re not spending time and energy running their own AdWords campaign. Otherwise we’d all be drowning in scrap lumber and empty Fiddle Faddle boxes.

(I’m not saying AdWords is an arcane and mystical discipline requiring years of harsh, ascetic training on the ghats of the Ganges delta. I’m saying that just because your doctor knows how to answer his phone doesn’t mean he’s not going to hire a receptionist.)

Anyway, all this was geared toward asking all you gentle readers a question, which (spoiler alert) is right there in my headline: What SEO rules do you follow? What SEO ethics do you think everyone should follow?

I’ll start the ball rolling with my own ironclad rule: Provide compelling, useful content, and the rest will follow. Oh, and anyone who uses the phrase “content is king” doesn’t actually think content is king; they just want you to believe they give content more than a passing nod. What they really care about most is text messaging David Allen’s blog posts to each other.