This may sound like a strange question coming from someone who lives and dies by SEO. Search engine optimization has been a very good field for me, and it has certainly opened doors for me. However, when I look at the big picture ( and I do that a lot, mind you) I see many search engine optimization professionals who spent numerous hours trying to maximize their client’s visibility by trying to feed the engines what they are looking for. The concepts such as keyword density, keyword research, and search engine optimized content are all great, but search engine optimized sites which show up at the top of search engines are not necessarily the results that users are looking for.

Search engine crawlers have gotten very smart in the past few years, and they don’t act like the good old “stupid” machines. At the same time, you can still trick them into ranking you higher by following the guidelines that search engines have provided you with. The question becomes how do you tell a good site from a rubbish site, if they are both optimized for search engines? Google is addressing that by having a trust factor in its algorithm. Trust could mean links from authority sites, and so on. So as long as you have great original content that is getting links from authority sites, then you are good. But, what happens when a quality but not search engine optimized site is competing against a rubbish but highly optimized website? You may say that, the first guys should pay more attention to SEO and that is true in a sense. But I feel as though optimizing pages for search engines has become easier than creating content (at least for some people). For every 1 quality site on the web, you see probably 100 terrible, useless sites. Search engine optimization has obviously somewhat contributed to this. In a sense, you are looking at probably 50 rubbish sites that having nothing but garbage (optimized garbage) on them. Obviously, the authority sites who know how the play the game will still rule the engines, but my feeling is that some smaller but good sites are getting ignored or pushed to the second or third pages and are replaced with search engine friendly sites. Why does this matter? Because searching shouldn’t be about how optimized your content is, but how useful it is to your readers.