Link Building IS SEO

Nic’s blog has a PageRank of 6/10, which is tough to do on a any site, not to mention a personal one, so I think he knows what SEO is. I understand PageRank isn’t everything, but it’s weighted heavily.

This is more an argument over semantics than anything else. That can help open minds on the subject, however, which in turn drives more traffic. But I know from personal experience if you’ve got quality content, people will follow. Then the search engines will take care of themselves giving you the “free” traffic you desire. Websites are built for humans. Search engines are too. So the former inseparably concerns the latter, which is in essence what both link building and content optimization aim to service.

I guess Nic’s point is to focus on humans, and the search bots will follow where humans go. That’s not to say you can’t do things to help, which you should, but maybe the same can’t always be said about focusing on search engines first.

DISCLAIMER: I am friends with Nic so note a tad bit of bias in my above comment.

The honest truth is that when you talk to people about SEO you’ll get a slew of different opinions as to what it is (unless they’re trying to sell you something).

I don’t think Link Building can be SEO because you don’t have control over other people’s websites. If you can’t control it, then you can’t optimize it. If it’s not a form of optimization (broad category), then it’s not a form of search engine optimization (narrow subset of that category).

You could just as easily and probably more accuratley (as far as a literal definition goes) say that Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the algorthms that a search engine runs on to prevent website owners from manipulating the results. That makes more sense, especially for someone who runs a search engine.

Searh engines don’t want to reflect the opinion of one website owner. They want to reflect some kind of greater consensus. So, unless you face that fact, you’re going to be struggling with your results everytime they launch an update to prevent you from manipulating those results. However, if you face that fact, then you can begin to try effecting that consensus to establish your website as an authority on a subject, which with or without search engine support will give you great results.

On the topic of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, I don’t think it’s garabage at all. It accurately sums up the current state of SEO. I only said two things about it 1) I didn’t want to link to it because I thought the author was obssessed with ranking in Google and 2) That the notion of Web = Cheap Advertising is a very short-sighted view of websites. I realise that idea is a prevailing thought and not just Aaron’s, and that I why I chose to address it. Websites can and should be much, much more than advertising.

I also would like to note that the article on Wikipedia hardly mentions Link Building at all, although that definition would seem to include it to a certain degree. The irony of a definition in Wikipedia is that it is by its very nature fluid and subject to change.

My main point is that you can’t directly effect your listing on a search engine, and you might as well spend your efforts making your website better in general and not just for search engines.

Yet again, we’re arguing semantics here as Blake points out. If we’re trying to decide whose definition of “SEO” matters, I think it’s the definition used by those who are paying money for the service. Most of my firm’s clients, when they come in asking about SEO mean “I want my website higher in search engines for certain keywords and I want you to do whatever it takes to get it there.” If that’s what clients mean by SEO and you accept that definition of the term, then link-building is SEO because it helps get websites ranked higher.

But as I always point out to clients, SEO is a means to an end and not the end itself. The end is more money, and as Nic states, making your site better for humans and not just search engines is important, otherwise you’re only doing half the job of making more money. It’s one thing to get traffic to your site, it’s another thing to get that traffic to do what you want them to once they reach your site, and the latter has absolutely nothing to do with SEO.