[Dale King]

If you visit the various webmaster and business forums like I do, it's pretty apparent that a lot of people think paying someone to do SEO is akin to magic pills, leprechauns and pixie dust. In other words... A BIG SCAM!

While I agree, there are definitely a lot of bad apples in SEO, there are also legitimate SEO companies who can and do deliver results consistently.

A few of the best SEO experts around include Shari Thurow, Jill Whalen and Danny Sullivan. If you read and heed their advice, you will never go wrong.

Do any of you have any opinions about SEO that you would like to share?

Dale King

[The Stealthy One]

SEO isn't a scam, but it's blown out of proportion. If you focus on making a good Website that attracts and keeps visitors, they'll take about your site and build your backlinks for you. Folks seem to lose sight of the fact that the primary goal for SEO is building more traffic - a good Website does this for you.

[stand856]

^^^^^^
Did u happen to be in South Jers yesterday, saw someone that looked like u driving a suburban.

And yes SEO is very overblown, half of the businesses that worry about it, dont even need it.

[GoBIGJosh]

I wouldn't say it's overblown. I think people just need help getting their websites indexed. Some people have such over complicated sites that it doesn't show up well for search engines. It happens, but as it stands. I wouldn't say it's overblown, i think quality content is more important.

[Aletheides]

It´s not a scam, but it´s not as difficult as people make it seem like..

[sniping4dummies]

Ok, if you think SEO is a big scam, let's see some of your amazing results? And btw...proper SEO involves a lot for a single website...

- Keyword research : can take hours to adequately determine which keywords will be the easiest to target, while still giving quality traffic
- Keywords in title
- Keywords in description
- Keywords in H1 tags
- Keywords in H2 tags
- Keywords in H3 tags
- Keywords in bold
- Keywords in italics
- Keywords as image alts
- Doing all of this and making your website still read like normal sales copy instead of keywords spam
- Doing this for separate pages on your site and properly setting up your link/deep-link structure
- Use of clean HTML/CSS, with few tables and little javascript.
- Knowing where to go after links : I'm sorry but just putting up a good site won't attract visitors, or it will at a very slow rate. Putting time into a proper link building campaign will pay off far faster and more plentifully than simply 'waiting around.'
- Being able to do all of this with SEO, and still have a website that converts sales at the end of it.

So SEO isn't so simple...it costs money because those who do it right spend a lot of time doing it.

[pbradish]

Great post Sniping.

SEO involves proper site structure, which takes time when done right.

[Terra Andersen]

SEO is definitely not a scam, but there are a lot of companies out there turning it into one. I have many sites that would not do well today if it wasn't for SEO. When it comes down to it, it's all about content. If your site is jam-packed with content about losing weight, and has some good incoming abd outgoing links, chances are, you'll rank well for that term. (not exactly that term, since it is really competitive.. bit you get the idea) -

There are also tons of other factors that go into it, like sniping4dummies noted.