

The Inconvenient Truth About SEO - vog
http://sweet.io/article/Opinion-Column:-The-Inconvenient-Truth-About-SEO/61f14784-45e4-11e2-9e7a-001d9232cd16/

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macavity23
Agree 100%, but I would add a suggestion: buying google ads will often give a
better return than SEO optimization for 'organic' results.

It's all well and good to say 'create interesting content', but for many sites
it just isn't worth it - simple brochureware sites for brick & mortar
businesses, for example.

The take-out restaurant on your high street shouldn't spend a lot of time
creating interesting and shareable content. Just advertise the menu clearly,
provide your contact details and location at the top of your home page in html
(not images), then buy some properly-targeted google ads. If someone is
looking for 'chinese restaurant <area>', they're highly likely to click your
ad.

Buying ads and keeping your page simple often produces better results than
cluttering your page with lots of 'optimizations', in my experience.

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vitalique
Excuse me, but what do you agree with? Do you think that it is enough to write
any arbitrary bold statement and then say something in the lines of 'I know
that sounds like an extreme position blabla' to make it sound more credible
and less pompous? Do you realize that author of this article completely
mistake some elementary SEO for content development plan/strategy? SEO has
evolved, you know? These two things are not mutually exclusive, they should go
hand in hand if you're going to have any kind of traffic before your business
dies.

This whole article is trying to somehow prove that SEO is definitely not
caring for you users, but writing content (what does it even mean?) magically
is! Ignoring the reality of search engine ranking algos may help you build
some kind of cool image if you are famous or lucky, but it doesn't necessarily
need to help your business. If you're in a business, writing good content for
the sake of writing good content is nonsense (it's worse, actually, because it
costs you money).

As to your suggestion: I've seen pure ads being both much better and much
worse than pure content building, but this is really comparing apples to
oranges. Careful testing is your best friend here, and I'd say that you can
always implement both strategies of building traffic without mixing them too
much: have pages with great (and optimized) content, and have landing pages
built specifically for ad-driven traffic.

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noibl
[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/12/11/seo-the-
inconveni...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/12/11/seo-the-inconvenient-
truth/)

Sweet.io: why?

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vitalique
Yikes, check this out: <http://sweet.io/admin/postview/>

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arikrak
Ouch.

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moepstar
Meh, 500 error - does anyone have a copy of the article (or a link to one)?

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kybernetyk
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sweet.i...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sweet.io/article/Opinion-
Column:-The-Inconvenient-Truth-About-
SEO/61f14784-45e4-11e2-9e7a-001d9232cd16/)

~~~
moepstar
Thanks - Once the traffic has subsidized i'll bookmark that article...

I couldn't agree more and will make everyone even thinking about employing
some zero-effort technique to #1 in SERPs read that...

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arikrak
It would be nice if that was true, but people have been able to successfully
game Google with SEO. Google can't actually tell the quality of content, so
the SEO shortcut often works.

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majani
So in this world of more than 8.3 billion web pages[1], I'm just supposed to
write really good content and wait for the traffic to roll in?

Believing that if you build it well, they will come is something that has
contributed to the death of many startups that I know. You have to make an
effort to stand out, and in a world wide web of 8.3 billion pages, you
probably need to be pushing and shoving your way to the top.

[1] <http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/>

