Not long ago I was clicking through one of my favorite sites and came across another article exhorting the importance of search engine optimization. The article was well written and pointed out all the reasons why and how optimizing your site would result in miraculous changes, if you would only follow the writer's advice. After I finished reading the article, out of curiosity, I followed the link back to his site to check it out.
I have a tool bar that shows the rank of each page that I visit and I noticed that his web site only had a page rank of 3. I found that surprising. If SEO is so important, then why would someone so knowledgeable on SEO have such a low page rank?
To appease my curiosity, I decided to look into the matter a little further. I selected 5 popular, business related, keywords and did a search of each of the keywords. I then visited the top ranked site of each keyword and viewed the source code of each of the web sites to see how much optimization they had done.
I realize that this simple little "exercise" is in no way scientific and no concrete conclusions can be drawn from the results, but, None of the top ranked sites were optimized at all. Zero, zilch, nada! They all used javascript extensively, which is supposedly a no no, they were table based, also a no no, alt tags were omitted or not properly used and on and on.
Wow, this is a real brain-teaser. We have been force-fed the SEO doctrine for low these many years and yet, the top ranked web sites have no optimization. Could it be that it's all just been a load of hooey?
One thing to consider is that SEO is not considered a good practice by the major search engines. The only thing that remotely relates to SEO, as we know it, listed in the "top" search engine is ("Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate"). The rest of the time is spent stressing the point to "Make pages for users, not for search engines".
Search engine robots don't care if you use tables to layout your site or if you use javascript, they don't even recognize javascript so why would it matter, they just skip over it. Search engines index and follow your code and for that reason your code should be valid to insure that the robot can easily and accurately crawl your site. Other than that, your time should be spent on creating a site that will attract "people" not search engines.
Web site owners should concentrate on WSO not SEO. People are who decide whether you have an interesting, informative well designed web site and it is people who decide whether to link to your site or not. Not search engines. Start acknowledging your readers as what they are, people, not visitors or traffic or users and you'll have a better web site.
Black hat SEO has been around for a long time. You've seen the ads in "adsense", banner ads, and most likely your mail box, claiming that if you buy their product or service they will guarantee you a top search rank. These are the proponents of SEO. The truth is that search engine optimization is merely another tool in the web developers tool box and used alone will do little for your rankings. If someone tells you that they can guarantee you a top rank, just smile and back away slowly.
Forget about SEO and search engines and concentrate on what's really important, the people that read it.
