A little bit of knowledge is dangerous - SEO Mind Crimes

A fellow Warringtonian, Anthony Fallon caused a bit of a stir by saying that "Search Engine Optimisation Is A Waste Of Time and Money" in his "SEO Mind Crime" blog post.

Many people missed the trick when they criticised his comments. Basically he was espousing the view tha SEO is only one aspect of Internet marketing and that there are many other ways of gaining traffic - not least the method he used to get his views noticed in the first place.

But the way he proved his case is as flawed as George Bush's case for going to war with Iraq. To prove that SEO wasn't necessary in the Web 2.0 era he asked people to search for "SEO Mind Crime" in Google. He claimed that his 3,4 & 6 positions within a couple of days after sending out a press release to PRWEB proves that you don't need SEO to get ranked. Anthony made the assertion:

“The new distribution technologies like RSS will get your message out there without any magic or manipulation of search results. The quality of Google’s Search technology is really coming on in leaps and bounds. If businesses can get in front of their customers without stuffing their content with keywords, it has to be a good thing. As for the SEO Industry, good riddance I say.”

To be totally honest, this is complete bollocks!

First off it's not exactly difficult to seo for that phrase as it's no "golden ticket"as SEO is all about the proper display of information, about correctly interlinking your important content, about hierarchy of content and, wait for it, encouraging your content to become an authority, or at the very least, a useful resource for your given topic.

His miss-understanding of SEO is astonishing, dare I say "ignorance" about SEO. Or is he? Is he simply link-baiting, is the "fool" really the clever little %$%^ that just says what is generally being regarded as false-hoods just to get every industry commentator linking to his site?

I do agree with many of his comments about the importance of PR, link-baiting, RSS distribution. But saying SEO has no place to play in internet marketing based on his view that SEO is just keyword stuffing is pure ignorance. If it were that simple then that's all of us would be doing. But because increasing the occurrence of the right keywords on a page is what virtually all SEO'ers do, then they need other factors to increase their page's "score" against those search terms.

For those that can't grasp the concept, I'll put it more simply:

Because SEO is fundamentaly about Keyword occurrence and that is where virtually where every SEO'er starts, we have to do more to increase that site's/page's attractiveness.

Furthermore, if SEO has no part to play in ranking then why does he have his title in a H1? it's not always the most popular way for non-seo'ers. Using the generally is. Also it's obvious that having "SEO mind Crime" linked from every internal page would add SEO "weight".

What Anthony is focusing on is the other fundamental aspect of SEO, namely linking. Purely because his press release has been syndicated on many sites that publish PRWEB press releases he gained many links very quickly which increased the crawl rate of the site.

So my challenge to Anthony is this?

Change SEO mind crime is this:

• Get rid of the H1 and change it to font styling
• Change the internal links to some other text, such as "SEO Doesn't Work", no scrub that - change your internal links to images
• Get rid of the nofollow's to the social links
• Add some hidden links to some porn sites on there
• Also add some links to some betting and casino sites
• get rid of your meta data

It won't have an effect will it? Seeing as "SEO is a Waste of Time and Money"