Posted by SEO'd in 
Search engine optimization has got quite a reputation among those who don’t know what the business is all about. Some consider SEO as a form of hacking. Others consider search engine professionals as snake oil salesmen. Of course, there are a few people that consider search engine optimization a bad thing for the whole web experience. A lot of bad reputation that search engine optimization has gotten in the past few years is due to SEOs being more obsessed about traffic than improving the experience of web searchers. There are many people that spend more time stuffing keyword, changing their copy to include more keywords that make sense, and even add more text elements to each page to get better rankings in the SERPs. I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t focus on on-page and off-page optimization tactics, but as a SEO, one needs to know why they go about implementing a certain strategy. Your audience may not care about minor changes to your website or a few extra keywords here or there, but it’s tough to know where the boundaries are.
It’s true that search engine optimizers are hired to help websites climb up the rankings and get more free traffic. But if you haven’t spent time to optimize your site to make things more convenient for your readers, you are missing the boat. And I am not talking about adding breadcrumbs or other forms of navigation to your website. It’s about providing value to your readers and giving them what they need. I can’t tell you how many times I have found a page on the first page of Google only to realize it offers no real value other than a page with a bunch of keywords on it. That’s not what the search is about.
Everyday thousands of new websites make their way to the Web. But only a few of them actually provide real value to their visitors. I would say the 1 – 99 rule applies here. In essence, less than 1% of websites on the web are responsible for 99% of fresh, valuable content on the Internet. This is of course a subjective number, but there are a ton of people who make a living by writing useless copy and slapping them on their pages. Of course, these folks are good at spamming blogs (to gain backlinks) and go out of their way to get their pages climb search engine rankings. But is that really helping the visitors’ experience on the World Wide Web?
SEO is all about providing more value to your visitors, in essence helping them find what they need on your website. But in order to do that, you need to have SOMETHING on your website. Just copying what others are writing on their websites or slapping press releases on your site does not exactly enhance the overall web experience for your visitors. You may get away with ranking high on Google. You may even make a killing with Google Adsense. But if you are not providing value with your content and don’t mind stealing other people’s content for your own gains, you are not exactly doing the field of SEO any favor. Parasitic business models are one of the reasons the World Wide Web is such a mess. Ethical SEOs are hoping to change all that.
