Jason Calcanis’ Tough Call On SEO
I understand completely that business people doing business online could be very interested in hiring the services of people calling themselves Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts. Let’s face it, we all like shortcuts so wouldn’t it make sense to hire someone to tune our website so that it would be more readily found and listed by the search engines?
Problem is, there are search engine optimization techniques and there are search engine optimization techniques - some are known as “black hat” and others as “white hat”, in the imagery of old Western movies where the bad guys wore black hats and the good guys wore white hats.
My layman’s explanation is that both the white hat and black hat SEO techniques are designed to help you set up and tweak your website so as to be more easily and succesfully searched and listed by the search engines. The difference is that the black hat techniques are designed to game or trick whatever systems the search engines have set up, as distinct from being more “naturally” attuned to those systems.
To me it seems a no-brainer that the black hat approach is especially vulnerable to being negated by the search engines changing the algorithms. Which means that using black hat techniques raises the risk stakes.
I ask my clients, Do you think Google has the money to hire the top PhDs graduating from MIT or wherever? And if so (because of course they do), how long do you think it takes Google to neutralize any “game the system” approach implicit in “black hat” SEO techniques? That’s right, not very long.
Jason Calacanis’ post, Black hat and White hat SEO (or “Is SEO B.S. or not?”), is not completely unkind to white hat SEO techniques, although he comes across as being decidedly not a fan of any of the SEO approaches. He explains why:
- a) if you do a great site and you take your time you will rise in the Google rankings
- b) I have faith in Google’s ability to sort the good from the bad
- c) all the SEO folks I’ve ever talked to–and I’ve talked to many over the past decade or so–have pitched me on expensive contracts that you can’t cancel for two years with them to do all kinds of shady things to move up in the rankings
- d) the best way to do SEO is make better content, more consistently
Of course, a well-maintained blog, with fresh content every week or - better still - every day, provides an organic type of search engine optimization, not requiring a lot of attention to the SEO theoreticians and SEO fixers.
Jason’s post is in my view required reading for any business owner who is thinking about spending money on SEO advice.
1 opinion for Jason Calcanis’ Tough Call On SEO
Brian Clark
Dec 12, 2006 at 8:36 am
With just a few easy tweaks, most blogs (especially those built on WordPress) are perfectly search engine friendly.
The hard part of “SEO” is getting links, and of course blogs are perfectly suited to get those as well, as long as the content is compelling and the conversation encouraged. :)
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