The Future of SEO

Last week's entertainment included a post and follow-up by ShoeMoney in which he prophesied the demise of SEO as we currently know it. As posts of this type will, it raised the ire of the SEO community at large, including this ridiculous, and thankfully brief, commentary by Sage Lewis. Let's put aside Mr. Lewis's apparent reading disability (he stumbles over quite a bit of his script - perhaps a retake was in order) and focus on this statement he makes:

SEO is all about optimizing for the visitor. You make the visitor experience great and you will be paid off in your search engine ranking results.

Unfortunately, this is mostly incorrect. Here's why:

Back-Links - SEOs spend vast amounts of time generating inbound links. Inbound back-links have zero capability to make the experience better for the site visitor.

The Algorithm - You can hardly read a semi-intellectual post about SEO without mention of "The Algo." Frankly, the search engine algorithms don't care about the visitor experience. They count keywords, look for on-page markup, and use other factors gleaned from the scraped page in an attempt to determine if said page is relevant to a particular search term. Here are some examples of how the algorithm really doesn't take the user experience into account and at times can be directly counter to a good user experience -

• Rewriting the URLs of a dynamic site so they look static does nothing for the user experience.
• Modifying site copy so that it's more keyword rich has no direct benefit for the user. In fact, any site that brings it's own voice and style to content creation often has to make editorial sacrifices in order to achieve a highly optimized piece of content. This directly results in a degradation of the user experience.
• Meta Description / Keyword / Title tags have little impact on the user experience.

Mr. Lewis might bring up the concept of good site architecture, and how a highly silo-ized site benefits both SEO and the site visitor. I'll agree on this point, but let's also remember that information architecture has been around much longer than SEO. Making a site intuitively navigable has been best practice in site creation for many hears and has nothing specific to do with SEO, other than the fact that the search algorithms need intra-site links to find content.

It's a bit presumptuous for Mr. Lewis, and the SEO community, to co-opt good site design in the name of search engine optimization. It's as if with one fell swoop they've made sites findable and been what site designers and IAs have been looking for all their lives.

The final irony here is, of course, that SearchEngineGuide has dedicated time to ShoeMoney's post. Here's what Mr. Lewis has to say -

... our industry falls for this every single time when somebody criticizes it, comes out and bashes it, and it comes out and links right back to the person. Which I find funny....This ShoeMoney character is not worth our time.

Of course, Mr. Lewis's post is free publicity for ShoeMoney. Now that's funny.

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