Linkedin has a discussion going called What don’t you trust about SEO (search engine optimization) … and why?. It’s a nightmarish tromp through the minds of those who equate SEO with human sacrifice rituals.

To be fair, some of the poor reputation is well deserved. Anyone worth their greed DNA knows that it takes a devil SEO to make potato salad out of cashews. If you’re dreaming of getting rich tomorrow, promising orgasmic results by reading the ebook you wrote while drunk at your buddy’s house last Saturday is absolutely going to require some down and dirty tactics to trick Google algorithms and brain-dead humans.

One guy in the Linkedin thread impressed everyone with his knowledge of AltaVista. The last press release from that search engine was in 2003. He also mentioned Lycos as a place SEO’s submit to. I just went there and learned about a girl who swallowed magnets and this week’s Mover and Shaker is Jamie Spears, the unmarried teenager who just had a baby. Yep. I want my web site there.

Some respondents in the “Bad SEO” thread had nothing to offer accept links to their web sites. Most wanted proof that SEO works. This is like saying we want proof that string theory is real or Moses really saw a burning bush. With each web site, results and techniques are unique. There are successes and failures. No two situations are the same. There’s so many variables involved. Believe in the promise of number one rank at your own risk. It’s like being baptized and promised you’ll go to heaven if you do. Nobody really knows for sure how it will all turn out.

The conversation in Linkedin is limited to the experiences of those who chose to participate. I don’t visit there myself for Q &A and had it not been for Sphinn, I wouldn’t have known about that discussion. Nearly every commenter had nothing positive to say about SEO. Quite depressing. I thought of going in there with my “Rah Rah SEO and Usability” position but this definition held me back:

Optimization is essential to an effective paid placement (SEM) campaign because of the importance of relevance. If your SEM matrix is not properly relevant (you are bidding on the phrase “Toyota” when you are selling “Ford”) you will pay more for a click. This CAN be optimized, but not easily. A proper optimization WILL reduce the CPC and the major search engines encourage this practice and will even help you do it.

I can tell when the mere mention of web site usability or user experience are going to be met with “huh?”

For the record, there are individual SEO’s and search engine marketing companies who include some sort of usability audit on their clients’ sites as part of the overall holistic approach to online marketing. I know this to be fact because I’m subcontracted or hired to perform their usability reports.

The goal of adding usability site reviews is converting inbound traffic to meet your business goals. This could be product sales, ordering services, booking reservations, newsletter signups, blog RSS feed subscriptions, sales leads, etc. A ranking promise for being “Number 1 in Google” is hollow. I can’t imagine paying money to be number one for a keyword and not having a powerful, working, persuasive web site behind those clicks.

Usability services can be applied at any time and may include (to name a few things):

1. Mock up reviews
2. Business requirements review
3. Functional requirements review
4. Assistance in preparing web site guidelines
5. Assistance in web site planning
6. Checking to make sure legal requirements are met
7. Functional testing of applications
8. Accessibility testing
9. Shopping cart and forms testing
10. Review of overall information architecture

Would you buy a house without first having it inspected by an outside, objective person trained to look out for your welfare?

An SEO company that doesn’t care about your investment is a red flag.

Does Your SEO Offer This Service to Support Your Objectives?

The main objective of usability reviews and functional testing is to help a business succeed. Often, a company simply doesn’t know how to be successful online because their staff isn’t experienced with all the skills necessary to be and remain competitive.

Usability is a business decision if revenue is expected to come from a web site. It’s used to determine what is wanted and needed by a business. Usability input is focused on delivering results and supporting all the ways and opportunities available to successfully meet those results. It’s tied to reputation management, customer service, word of mouth advertising and the return of investment for all marketing.

In addition to support for the business goals, usability testing acts as an advocate for customers and end users by educating companies on data collected on known user behavior, usage habits and issues such as those of disabled persons and the sight impaired. In some countries, such as the USA and the UK, web sites must meet certain legal requirements to do business online. Usability and human factors research are ongoing and closely tied to marketing goals and incentives.

Making a bad choice is your right of course.

There’s plenty of information available to help companies make wise decisions. I’m surprised that with all the search engine marketing conferences and live blogging of sessions, that barely a dent is made in the overall reputation of the SEO/M industry. For every class-act business or search marketer, there appears to be 20 rip offs and countless thousands of people and companies who buy into their schemes.

I hate to say it this way but the truth is, if you’re hiring any service that’s intended to help you succeed, put your “bullshit detector” on. There’s no magic formula. When you do locate and hire a credible company or person,  listen to them and follow their advice.

Sometimes the fault lies not with the SEO, but with the fact that nobody followed their guidance.

After reading a funny post in a discussion group about SEO and astrology, I came upon another discussion that wonders What Is Seo These Days?

What is SEO is these days and how does PPC fit in and provide benefits to an organic campaign?

Is it “dead”? Dependent on the position of the planets? How about the weather? Is search engine optimization voodoo magic?

Do we even need SEO anymore?

Some of the comments so far:

SEO is:

1. Getting pages crawled by SE’s

2. Appearing in search results (SERPS)

3. Coming up high in SERPS (not beating competition but being satisfied to be in top 10)

4. Persuading searchers to click into the site (still part of on page SEO)

5. Following up with a site that’s usable, accessible and converts marketing traffic to completing the goals set forth by the site

To do this means understanding web design, programming, copywriting, persuasive architecture, user experience design, accessibility, target user demographics and user behavior.

“An SEO is someone who understands how people search for information (on the web and in other ways) and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid listings that are provided. A search marketer, by the way, is someone that ensures listing in both paid and unpaid listings.”

I still believe that Internet marketing is a better expression of what we should all be doing as we build websites that perform and achieve the objectives of their owners.

The “easier to use” aspect of my definition encompasses usability, accessibility, increasing conversions, and other activities that help obtain the objectives of someone who has a site and wants to increase their visibility on the Web while fulfilling the purposes for which they put the site online in the first place.

Far from being an exercise in futility, search engine optimization and marketing are skills web site owners depend on.

However, it’s a practice not limited to search engines anymore.

While presenting a class on web site usability in New York for Internet Marketing Ninjas Marketing Training, my husband was in the audience as cheerleader and teacher.

I wasn’t connected at first and I could feel it. I wasn’t inspired. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be because the first part was the boring stuff I had to discuss, like business requirements. I said “um” 340 times. However, once I pulled up the screenshot of a web site I’m working on for an artist, Eric said I suddenly “lit up”. I connected. My passion for this web project and devotion to the artist raised my energy level.

From then on, I made eye contact with the audience. I laughed. I read their faces and could tell when I needed to bring them back if they slipped from me. When I got to my ideas about chaos theory, web design, usability and SEO, I saw several people sit up in their chairs to pay better attention. Who would have thought a usability consultant would be talking about the union of energy points with SEO’s?

It was my first ever solo talk. I learned that I was dead in the water unless I allowed my passion out to roam around the room. It was my excitement and love for my work that hooked the room and helped attendees to stay awake to hear what I had to say. If I could light their fire and get them jazzed for their own projects and careers, all the better.

Thought Leaders

Marty Weintraub wrote an interesting blog post called Need to Hire SEM Help? Where to Find Industry Thought Leaders. Doug Heil raised valid points in the comments. Indeed, it is difficult to find skilled SEO’s these days. The top level practitioners do far more than organic SEO. They’ve gone beyond to pick up training in copy writing, user experience design, off line marketing, accessibility and programming.

I doubt these sought after individuals are spending time on the road speaking or running forums. Some do of course. But, I’ve often wondered how much work a “leader” is actually doing when they’re out on the speaker circuit and traveling around the world week after week.

I know that I have to make time to be away from my Administrator duties at Cre8asiteforums to focus on my usability consulting business, keeping my skills current, raising my kids and being a wife. Somewhere in there I need to find time for me and trust me, most of the time I can’t find where I last put me.

Do we want to hire leaders? What do they offer? I like how Marty labeled it “thought leader”. I prefer to be out there, thinking and exploring. I like to open doors for people who have a “special something”. I want to inspire, but that’s because I’m quickly bored. If I won’t listen to myself, how can I expect anyone else to?

Passion Sells Because It Connects

I believe that we create best when we’re in love with our topic. Passion, devotion, adoration, persistence, whatever you want to call it - it’s what drives us to do something because we HAVE to. Even more, we WANT to.

This is why links for the sake of links was always a dead idea for me when it became the craze in 1999. All these years later and many still think that it’s the link that matters. It’s not. What has always mattered is content. People don’t get passionate over links or even anchor text. They react to content.

Miriam Ellis wrote a powerful piece called Links And Better Things Come When People Care. She wrote:

I remember first learning about the importance of link acquisition as a brand new SEO. I had a vague idea that I would be writing to related businesses and asking them nicely to link to whatever website I was working on. The trouble was, the first projects I was asked to do this on were not being run by businesses who had invested the time to create content worth linking to.

Miriam is an activist at heart, as well as web designer and search engine marketer. She’s discovered, as I have, that the projects we care about will feel and act differently to us. The marketing is different. User response is remarkable.

I’ve been able to act as both an information resource as well as a liaison between interested parties, facilitating new important relationships between people who can help one another. A secondary good is the fact that my blog has now been linked to, unasked, by every major entity involved in this project as well as by multiple media sources, wrote Miriam.

My artist friend, whose web site I took over, told me that one night before I uploaded the redesigned version, he looked at his old site after hearing my feedback on it. I had explained to him all the reasons why it was dead and not working for him. He hadn’t understood this until he looked at it again from the perspective of a usability consultant. He told me he was amazed at all that was missing from the old site that he just never noticed before. He had trusted he would be taken care of by those who had built his web sites.

Two webmasters built him web sites on two separate domains. Both were uninspiring, unattractive and lacked a reason to remain on the site or worse, bookmark it or ever return. Two chances. Two complete duds.

I saw his art. I spent the time to get to know the artist as a man, human, visionary. I know he’ll be famous. Neither of the other two webmasters believed and it showed in their work. Neither of them had a clue about SEO, accessibility, persuasive design or marketing.

In today’s Internet market, these skills are what you will need to look for. Skills, along with passion. You want people who help you to succeed and who know how to make it happen because they want this for you.

As Miriam wrote,

Now, I have begun to see that the more the web, and the job of the SEO, is viewed as real life, the more naturally really good work will take place, the more powerful and effective our efforts can be, the more impact those efforts can have on our lives outside the web.

A few have been saying this all along. Ted Ulle (Tedster) and Jill Whalen have long been saying, “Keep it natural”. It’s what separates those who deserve your money from those who don’t.

Discussion on SEO with Passion.

After reading more blog posts on the latest Google outrage against its Toolbar Page Rank (TBPR) score and reading everything from “Danny warned us” to “Matt Cutts has confirmed” to “Nobody cares”, I had this image of the game, “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”.

Yesterday, I wrote two blog posts addressed to Google, that I didn’t post.

One was called “Do You Think My Blog is Too Fat”, in which I visualized standing in front of Google’s mirror. For me, a woman of pre-Dove self-esteem, a mirror is a weapon. As a web site owner and woman, I view any of my attempts to please Google as a total and complete lost cause.

The other post I wrote, that will never see the light of Internet, is “Ten Reasons for Escaping the Google Regime”. I started out by cracking jokes:

2. They’re control freaks. Even the ice cream they serve their employees had to be reformulated before being approved by the Google Founders. (It was cute when I thought it was because they cared about nutrition. I no longer believe that fantasy.)

By the ending, my blood pressure had soared, as evidenced by,

Does the damn score have importance or not?

Round and around and around we go. Where we stop, nobody knows.

At first, especially after asking questions in public forums, at the risk of sounding “stupid”, I felt stupid. I felt like an ass. There’s been no positive vibe like I’m a hot blooded two year old racing mare on the racetrack of success kind. Who wouldn’t want THAT one?

I toured Google. I’ve met some of its people. I’ve visited the Google Tribe and wished to be initiated into It. They could have my body and soul if they’d wished.

But after one of my sites was punished for something I didn’t realize was a threat, because there’s not a shred of evil under-handed ego-guided greedy belly button worship energy in me, I’m not feeling that nice, cozy, thing I had going on there.

Google, may I just say, you got the wrong girl.

So, to cheer myself up and deal with the ongoing confusion over how to please Google, potential advertisers, web site visitors, other search engines who don’t scare the hell out of me and maintain world peace all at the same time, I now think of Google as a donkey.

We may never be able to pin the tail on their butt because they keep spinning everyone around to keep us from getting things just right, but they look a lot less annoying in this position.

I may be a minority squeak in the thunderous outcry from the search engine marketing industry towards Google and their sudden, unexplained mass drop in “PR score” applied to web sites. I never bought into the hype over PR scores. Regardless of all the reasons to jump on the scoring bandwagon as a way to determine web site value, I refused on the grounds that I wanted genuine worth, not forced.

There’s many easy ways to take advantage of Google’s methods for deciding which web sites are the most valuable. When they created algorithms based on link popularity, they devised the means to manipulate and play upon our “human-ness”, such as self esteem and personal attachment.

Nobody likes metric values placed on something that may be an extension of who they are.

Business owners will do whatever it takes to get their web properties on top of search engine results. Search engines know there’s nothing worse than that feeling of being “ugly”, “unworthy”, “unimportant”, and “not worth linking to”. Several rank solutions are offered such as paying for inclusion. This is advertising and it’s not free. An inexpensive alternative, especially for startup sites, is networking via links. When done with integrity and logic by skilled experts such as Debra Mastler and Eric Ward, reciprocal linking produces positive results.

When the linking process became automated and later evolved into paying for links based on a site’s “PR score”, Google apparently woke up. Why did it take them so long? Why is Google suddenly waging war on web site owners who “wheeled and dealed” to promote their web sites? It’s not as though paying for search engine exposure is something new. Search engines have been taking money from corporate sites for high SERP placement, behind the scenes, since search engines were first invented.

Small and medium web sites have been forced to resort to all sorts of tactics, creating the search engine marketing industry as a result. It’s hard to believe any search engine would punish SEO’s, when it’s they who bring in tons of revenue by connecting their clients to Internet search.

Not every web site owner chooses the search marketing “fast track” to rank. Some remain organic because it suits them. I’m one of them, which is why I never did link exchanges or cared about PR scores. It takes longer to be noticed when you take your time and “do good”, one on one, day by day, heart to heart, soul to soul.

Much, much longer…and I’m not saying it’s the right choice for a business. If I was just starting out now, as opposed to 1996 when I came online, I’d be making different marketing choices.

Wanting to Hold On to the Genuine

I feel that my web sites and business services are an extension of myself. I can’t be something I’m not. I’m unable to use other web sites to make me look better by paying to be on them.

Search engines have a unique way of judging and analyzing web sites. I don’t happen to believe they do this well or accurately.

Take Cre8asiteforums, for example. It was slapped by Google too. For some reason, our PR score went down. We’ve never purchased links, paid for ad space or paid for inclusion. We host ads from two places - Google and Text Link Ads. We don”t earn much money from Google or TLA, but what revenue we have earned, we turned around and gave it away to educational facilities to help fund internships or those who needed financial aid to study with.

How can an algorithm understand intent?

How can any search engine gauge and measure truth, honesty, and those moments when people interact, site to site, link to link, with good intent? Can search engines monitor comments and place value on sites this way? I wouldn’t want this. Everyone knows it’s far easier to complain on the web. Site owners know web site feedback is largely negative, rather than “Hey, great work!”. Should algorithms put more weight on user generated content in determining site or page value? How would we control that?

I’ve come to think I have this idealist view on Internet technology and “bots” that decide the worth of web site properties. I stubbornly believe they can put me into this tiny box and give me any label they wish, but, search marketing or no search marketing, I’m not going to let them change who I am.

If I’m a “PR 0″, I’m not any less of a human being worth getting to know, link to or do business with.

Sure, I’m not an “A-List blogger”. I’m not one of those top usability companies. I’m not a famous conference speaker. I have a terrible habit of volunteering my time, rather than being paid for it. My sites rank well because of years of being out there, being who I am, and not pretending to be something else. I can be shy at first. Definitely klutzy. I’m terrible at remembering names. But when I do my work?

I’m worth every penny.

A tool bar will never know this about me.