SEO drives me nuts when I see lots of sites with multiple paragraphs of light grey text on the home page repeating the metadata such as site description, tags, etc.

I agree with Jeff that Jason is mixing online marketing at the meta-level with SEO, apples to oranges comparison.

The arms race has just started, wait until major corporations start funding click-fraud campaigns on a large scale.

Wikia is not going to do so well.

“Audience targeting, content strategy, brand messaging, content development, and web site promotion” are all vital parts of good online marketing, but they are not Search Engine Optimization except in that good content is inherently good for search engine rankings.

OK, maybe “web site promotion” can be considered SEO, in that impressing people enough to link to your site builds your PageRank — but, still, it’s PageRank itself that is boosting your search ranking — hence, you’re still “impressing a machine”. That machine just happens to be impressed by how well you impress humans!

Look, I was just having a bit of fun exaggerating how excited someone might get if SEO were completely unnecessary. Nothing I wrote seriously expressed any real attitudes of myself or the agency. I’m sorry if this was misinterpreted.

Absolutely there are some \”hacks\” in SEO, but its absolutely wrong to characterize the field as one where the person with the most alt tags wins. While true in 2001, SEO, at least good SEO, is now much more about audience targeting, content strategy, brand messaging, content development, and web site promotion.

What’s more, it is absolutely disingenuous to even suggest that this SEO ‘arms race’ impairs creativity. Web analytics, usability, and accessibility each place a much greater burden on creativity than SEO, and what’s more, any designer or agency whose creativity is unduly burdened by SEO guidelines likely doesn’t have the professional competence to be in web marketing to begin with.

Lastly, as far as gaming goes, Google is absolutely vulnerable to gaming, but no more or no less than Digg or Wikipedia. Well, maybe wikipedia…..

Nonetheless, Google is ranking pages via a computer algorithm, not via an army of human readers, and therefore, it can be gamed. The “tyranny” comes from having to compete with sites that can always make use of one more trick than you do – creating an arms race of SEO “hacks”. The more “hacks” you have to work into your content to compete, the more your original message gets distorted. Hence the negative effect on creativity. The word “tyranny” was used as a bit of hyperbole – not entirely said “with a straight face”. Even so, how one makes the leap from that to “not getting the web” is a mystery to me.

No offense, but if you say this with a straight face, you have no business being online at all. Why don’t you just hang a big sign around your neck that says “We don’t get the web. We never will. We’re just waiting patiently while some kid with a laptop kills us and the dinosaurs we’re riding in on.”

I’ll tell you what, you can even use Flash to make the sign.