Slaying the SEOgre

Once, when I was starting out in web design, I had a client/friend who didn't really know much about technology, and he had this impression that there were basically free customers to be had through the magic of Internet marketing, and specifically search engine optimization (SEO). He put me in touch with a contact of his, actually paid for me to spend an hour or two with this guy, to learn SEO. What I learned terrified me. I ended up writing a whole long article about how SEO lies somewhere between ill-advised and unethical. I resolved to educate my clients. However, the first sell was the hardest, and I never did convince this friend of mine, who had shelled out a couple hundred bucks for my benefit and his, that he did not in fact want me to magically produce free customers for him. I never published the article.

[Background: SEO is basically the attempt to trick Google, etc. into ranking you higher than they ought to. The motivation is greed: top-10 rankings translate into traffic, and traffic is money.]

I've lived in fear of SEO ever since. I enjoy building websites, but I hate the thought of optimizing them for search engines. Websites should be optimized for humans. And this actually has held me back. It's a check on my own marketing efforts, this fear that sooner or later clients will ask me to do SEO for them. I was just worrying about this today, in fact. Because what I want to do is tell clients to forget about SEO. Instead, think about human optimization, or something like that. But can I afford to take that stand?

Enter Josh Klein, whom I learned about through the BIF conference (which I discovered tonight). I pretty quickly found "Ranking highly in search engines has nothing to do with SEO." A few quotes:

Forget SEO and think WOMO … er, word of mouth optimization.

Optimizing for search can only be done by optimizing for humans.

The only long term strategy involves making a website worth caring about, and that has nothing to do with search engines.

The things that actually work in the search engines are precisely the things you would be doing if search engines didn’t exist. This may not be a useful tip to the SEO crazies (you know who you are), but to the rest of you who look at your website holistically, I think this is refreshing. After all, you do care about what happens after someone from search reaches your site… right?

Refreshing indeed! Affirmation! From some speaker at an expensive conference! Josh does give tips for actually doing SEO anyways, but I am now fortified with an argument from authority for any client that asks for magical free customers. On belay.

Update: Turns out that this Josh Klein is not that Josh Klein. Whoa!