The SEO Question: Is it Trickery? Or is it Beneficial?

SEO – Search Engine Optimization for the uninitiated – isn’t something I delved into until several years after I’d begun my Google AdWords experience. The reason is simple: AdWords was flooding my sites with so much traffic and so many conversions that I never even gave SEO a second thought, until finally one day I realized that I can only push AdWords so far and there are only so many searches for my high-converting keywords, so it was time to give SEO a shot.

Fortunately, most of my sites already rank well for their relevant terms. Because they’re relevant. And because they already have plenty of “authority” or what the SEO guys like to call “link juice” – high authority domains linking to them. This is the results of long providing good solid content, along with excellent value and service to my customers.

Which begs the question: Is using SEO really a form of deceiving the search engines, since if you already had relevant content and enough backlinks, you wouldn’t need to do it in the first place?

This question came up in a discussion forum I was reading the other day and it really brings up a good point. There are two kinds of people who use SEO strategies to rank their websites:

1. Perfectly legitimate businesses that want to grow their online presence, including everything from small local businesses to large e-commerce sites. In many cases, these companies already have a website that’s relevant, and have good links pointing to them, but due to a lack of basic SEO site structure and strategy, their sites are not optimized at all and in many cases are killing their rankings. For example, I just had a consult with a new client whose site is fantastic, but isn’t getting any decent traffic.

Why?

Because all of the title tags, for every page, are the company name – which is totally irrelevant to the service they’re selling!

By making simple changes like this, and fixing others – like missing description meta tags – an otherwise good website will get with the program when it comes to SEO.

2. The other variety of SEO users are in the “black hat” realm, particularly get-rich-quickers and affiliate marketers. A typical scenario is someone who provides no product or service, and zero value to customers, but who is playing the affiliate arbitrage game by setting up phony product review websites that direct you to an eBay or Amazon or other affiliate link at the bottom of the review.

Since these people have no value and little content to offer, they are forced to resort to using SEO tricks to rank in the search engines. And I don’t like it.

As someone who directly sells my own products online, I can tell you it’s infuriating to have someone sign up as an affiliate and then put up a weak website, SEO it for my trademarked product name, and “poach” traffic from people who were looking for my website in the first place. And for this they “earn” a 50% commission.

(I’m adding a trademark policy to my affiliate program terms & conditions to ban this practice but that’s beyond the scope of this article.)

So, what’s the takeaway from all this?

Simple: SEO is beneficial and necessary for real businesses. They help the business, and they help customers, who need their products or services, to find them. But it gets a bad rap because if you go into any SEO discussion forum you’ll be surrounded by the black hat types who are trying to game the system in order to “earn” a passive income without any real work.