Following on from the interesting post about Google vs MSN, I have to ask the hidden question there. Is there any point in search engine optimisation – especially paid for SEO.
At the end of the day websites fall into a few categories. Commerical Sites where some one wants to sell something (tangible product or service), ego sites where some one just wants to talk about themselves (blogs etc :)), information sites where some one knows something they want to share with the world and advertising sites where some one (normally a company) want a site just to show off how great they are.

Now, looking at the basic one first – the ego site. While it may flatter the webmaster if people read their blog etc., they dont really gain anything out of it and unless it is the most “hip” blog on earth people arent likely to search for keywords that relate to the blog content. Even when they do will they visit your site? When was the last time you did a Google search, saw the world blog in the title and actually bothered to go to the site? Its rare (unless you are searching for blogs.) Often people see blogs as a bit of an “insiders joke” and unless you are famous, do people really want to read your musings? (You’d be impressed at how few hits a well written site like this gets….)

So does a blog need SEO? Probably not. Hits arent going to come from Goog/MSN etc. They do need to get publicity on Technorati etc., though as without that hits = 0 and blog = dead.

Next commercial sites. Now these are the main ones targeted by SEO companies, but again I think its overkill. If you have a solid real-world advertising campaign then people will (you hope) type your URL in to either the address bar or at worst the google search box. Either way, you should hit the top without any need for arcane SEO rituals and sacrificed goats. Now, critcally, recently we did a look at some SEO products and they were very adept at getting higher page rankings for keywords that weren’t really all that relevant. Do you want this? Are you so desparate for webtraffic that you dont care who they are or why they have visited your site? (If so buy some pixel adverts….).

Everyone who visits your website uses your bandwidth and places a (albeit small) load on your server. If you sell lawnmower parts and they are looking for hiking boots not only have you incurred a cost (small though it is) to serve up the pages, but the potential future customer gets a sour taste about your company and goes away.

All in all, a loose – loose scenario. You do not need SEO.

Information sites are slightly different as they really have no purpose other than providing esoteric information for bored websurfers and students. Search engines can help, in that people looking for (for example) “Crop Rotation in the 13th century” are much more likely to type it into a search engine than go to www.13century-crop-rotation.com and see if it exists. However, if you need to utilise the demonic powers of SEO to get your site ranked, then you should re-think your content in general. While the internet is a fantastic resource, there is (often) a massive amount of regurgitation of information. If your knowledge is truly unique, then you wont have any competition and therfore wont need SEO.

So I suppose in this case, SEO gets a maybe.

Finally, “pure” Advetising sites. Sites with no function other than to show a company logo to you. Often made from pure flash or some other state of the art (i.e. annoying) technology with little or no content. As these sites come from big companies (normally) with even bigger advertising budgets the effect of driving non-customers to the site is not really an issue. All they want is eyes on the advert – everything else is secondary.

Often the lack of real content on these sites causes problems, but to work they need to be high ranked sites in search engines. Hardly anyone will visit www.advertising-site.com just to look at the adverts, but if you search for XYZ and a site ranks high, you may visit out of curiosity and (hopefully to the company) remember the advert at a later date.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this behaviour – it is business and its sites like this that drive down the cost of everyone else’s sites. However, to function they really do need to be SEO’d to death. The whole goat, not just the entrails.

So there you have it – my opinions laid bare. Unless your site is pointless advertising you probably dont need to do anything special regarding SEO. This doesnt mean code like the site was done by a cat running over your keyboard in frontpage though! Clean, semantic, markup will do all the SEO you need.

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