Google‘s head of web spam has hit the nail on the head with regard to the meaning of “SEO” and what “Seeing” is all about in his latest Webmaster Help video (Yes yes, I know, he’s actually talking about whether SEO should be called something else, but he’s still shedding light on the true roles of legit SEO.
A lot of the times when you hear SEO, people get this very narrow blinder on, and they start thinking link building, and I think that limits the field and limits your imagination a little bit,” says Cuts. “It’s almost like anything you’re doing is making a great site – making sure it is accessible and crawl able, and then, almost marketing it, you can play slots for real money – letting the world know about it.”
“So, it’s a shame that search engine marketing historically refers to paid things like Ad Words because otherwise, I think that would be a great way to view it,” he says. “You could also think about not search engine optimization, but search experience optimization. Would users like to see the snippet on the page? Do they land? Do they convert well? Are they happy? Do they want to bookmark it, tell their friends about it, or come back to it?
SEO does have this kind of connotation for a lot of people, and we’ve seen it in media like CSI-type shows where somebody says they’re an SEO and people have this ‘worthless shady criminals’ kind of view – somebody called SEOs that, and I don’t know how to escape that, because there are a few people who are black hats, who hack sites and give the whole field a bad name, and there are a few people who sell snake oil, who give the field a bad name. And unless people drive those guys out of our midst, we’re going to have this somewhat bad, shaky reputation for SEO,” he says.
“At the same time, if you change the name to something else, all the people will just come along, and a few of those will be bad actors as well,” says Cuts. “If you have a few bad apples then that will sort of change the reputation of whatever new name you pick, so in my personal opinion, the best way to tackle it would be, you know, think about it in broad terms, or maybe think about how can we differentiate the great stuff that people do making their site faster, more accessible, helping people with keyword research like australia, all that sort of stuff marketing in different ways.” We’ve learned that it’s a constantly evolving game as algorithms change daily, new ways to market content emerge and social networks compete to give their users (and often our target markets), the best possible experience out there.
But what is the one thing that has never changed
Hundreds and thousands of blog posts and articles around the web give you false information as to how you can go about getting your website to rank #1 on Google. Here at Bay Point, we don’t focus on silly titles, such as the “SEO Ninjas, SEO Sheriff, or SEO Grandmaster”. We don’t waste time on writing misleading help guides (this one was an exception) or long-winded boring proposals. We focus on the work at hand, and that is to get you ranked!