I held the top spot for search terms relating to my service and site for more than a decade, until I shut it down. I never spent one second of my life worrying about SEO. I focused on usability, generating word of mouth (far more valuable - how do you think people found out about Facebook and Twitter?), and content.

The nature of a search engine is to derive the value of your content from the content. Therefore, focusing on your content is a far greater return in value than focusing on trying to draw the attention of a search engine to tags, meta data, or URL paths. Not saying that those things don't contribute, but I'm not certain that the ROI is worthwhile.

Think of it like a resume. If you have the talent and background to put on a resume, you'll get consideration. You don't need to spend hours upon hours refining it to add just the right trendy keywords or ordering things in the most appealing way to automated resume readers. On the other hand, if you have little to offer and you are concerned that you'll be weeded out quickly as a result, you can substitute your background and experience (content) with keywords and other tricks to try and get beyond the initial weeding out. Kind of a tactic of desperation and lack of confidence.

I do have a strong bias against the whole SEO thing. I won't pretend that I don't. I'm put off when I hear people focusing on it rather than content and it makes me think of greasy, scummy, snake-oil salesmen. Guys on late night infomercials trying to convince you that you can skip everything and get right to becoming rich and famous by thumbing through their special book and employing their special techniques for flipping property with only two hours of work per week.

This is probably a very unpopular opinion to share around a group like this, but what can I say?

We all have our biases, but not all biases are legitimate.

I'm biased as a developer who started a site that ranked top 3 for about 5K very competitive long tail phrases. So I've seen first hand the enormous benefit of allowing some time/effort/thought toward usability for bots.

It's not a given that Google will just "figure it out" and your reward will be in heaven. Anyone who thinks that is just hoping Google will do their job for them.

The upside for me is not having to work for the man thanks to selling the aforementioned site.

"It's not a given that Google will just "figure it out" and your reward will be in heaven. Anyone who thinks that is just hoping Google will do their job for them.'

i imagine in Google's perfect world there is little or no room for SEO. doesn't that mean it actually is Google's job?

I think the key phrase here is 'usability for bots'. If you recognize bots as an important customer (after all, they bring over most of your new traffic), then it makes sense to optimize things for them to find. That said, somewhere in between of not writing your whole site in Flash and creating a link farm, things start getting slimy and your arbitrary line will likely differ from, say, Google's.

I think the difference between the best SEO agencies and the majority is that the best continually run experiments to try and understand what Google is doing. This takes no little skill and a lot of time and effort.

The rest just read and regurgitate the results of those experiments when the experimenter decides to release those results (ie when it's not too much of a competitive advantage).

You mean like how stack overflow was having problems with Google not crawling their site, until they took a few minutes to set their site up to be Google bot friendly?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/the-importance-of-s...

> generating word of mouth (far more valuable - how do you think people found out about Facebook and Twitter?), and content.

This is pretty much what SEO people mean by white hat SEO. Create interesting/valuable content that people will link to, and you will be rewarded in search engine rankings.

I was thinking about the same thing last week when I came up with my SEO strategy: Make something so great that people care about it.

And how do they know about it to care about it? Chicken/egg.

They know about it because other people care enough about it to talk about it. We're working on building that small critical mass through non-SEO means.

you've clearly never had any dealings with recruitment agents