Samizdata - 4:21 pm on Feb 19, 2009 (gmt 0)

A nice provocative thread starter with an arresting title.

I will go one further and say that everything useful that the term "SEO" covers comes under the generic heading of "making a website properly".

For example, paying attention to Title, Description, H tags, keywords and semantic markup is what any student webmaster should be learning in chapter one of the instruction manual - but the vast majority of "webmasters" probably don't fully understand such things.

In addition there are server configuration issues such as canonical fixes - probably not chapter one stuff, but something that should be understood before you are granted your "webmaster licence".

Other "SEO techniques" tend to be exploitative and only work short term (e.g. keyword stuffing) until the search engines detect them and deal with them.

The reason that "SEO" became an occupation in itself is that most websites are badly made by people who understand little about how they work, many of whom simply rely on site-authoring software and assume that it does everything properly - they had to pay for it, the reasoning goes, so it must be better than using Notepad to write HTML (assuming they even know that they have a free text editor on their computer).

While it is a perfectly legitimate occupation to improve badly made websites in exchange for money, the distinction between an "SEO practitioner" and a "webmaster" has always seemed spurious to me.

I never use the term "SEO' with clients, and avoid taking on clients who do.

But I suspect that SEO is far from dead - there is enough ignorance around to support it for many years yet, and there is one born every minute.

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