If you believe SEO created any major site i've got a bridge to sell you. 100 uniques a day from SEO gives you 20 signups a day. How do you get from 20 signups a day to millions of users using seo?
Digg is mostly about SEO. They get something like 50% of their traffic from Google. Same with Wikipedia. Those are examples of where SEO can be win for everyone, good content that ranks high because of well structured pages and relevant content.
I don't think Wikipedia's Google traffic is from people randomly bumping into it; I get to Wikipedia through Google because Google's search is faster and less finicky.
What? I think the opposite is happening; Those sites rank high on google because they get so much traffic. Half the time I navigate to a page via google rather than type out the URL. If I'm looking for a wikipedia article, I usually add 'wikipedia' or 'site:...'
1) It started out free when everybody else was charging something.
2) Social psychology, where people want to connect with other people, in communication, physical and emotional levels, so without restrictions it prospered.
Really? What aspect of it is unappealing? Personally, if I were to go the startup route, I would feel pretty successful if I had a salary of ~$6M a year. I imagine you would too.
So, you object to his SEO work. Why is SEO any different than opening up a restaurant at a particularly busy intersection? Seriously, I'm curious why SEO is not the coolest way to build a product.
Because SEO is not a product. The way most people (including Markus) do it it's all about gaming the system, tricking users, and generally being very scammy/spammy with your site. SEO requires a ton of work too, and you could take that same energy and put it into actually creating something new and valuable. If you do it well the world is richer and so are you.
If you really believe that, you should learn more about SEO. A big part of SEO is:
1) Making sure search engines can find and understand all of your pages.
2) Making sure that people want to visit your site when your pages show up on SERPs.
3) Making sure that LOTS of people link to you and talk about you online (the PlentyofFish guy has nailed this).
4) Assorted markup tricks that help people find your site better.
5) Understanding what people are googling for when they are looking for products/services like you provide.
If you think dissing SEO is taking the high road-- you're half right. There are "black-hat" tricks that you should avoid. But throwing out SEO as "meaningless if you have a great product" isn't taking the high road. It's taking the stupid road.
I do agree. That's why I said "the way most people do it" and not all. When people talk about building a site through SEO they're almost always talking about those black-hat tricks. I'm all for the kind of SEO that Digg or Wikipedia does. I'm not suggesting you ignore SEO altogether. My point was that SEO is not a product in and of itself.
It doesn't matter how good your site is, if nobody knows about it, you won't get any visitors. By the same token, if you manage to game the system and trick people to come to your site, and your site doesn't deliver, you'll just lose them again anyway.
You need a quality product and you need to get it noticed. The "Field of Dreams"-style "Build it and they will come" approach doesn't work.
I still don't understand, don't we all agree that making the best product is not the only thing? Marketing, advertising, development, all of these are equally important. This was well summarized in this post (http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=23916 ).
plentyoffish.com created something new and valuable. A free, simple, website, for online dating. It's not fancy, it's ugly, but it looks like it just works on tons of browsers.
I agree, spam systems piss me off. However, I read plentyoffish.com's founder's posts on some SEO boards, and basically they give him good advice to make his product all around better. Ethical SEO sites basically say, if you have a good site, people will write articles about and increase your pagerank. So, it seems to me, SEO can be done ethically.
