In one of Seth Godin's maddening blog posts about the SEO industry he wrote,
"Just a short time ago, SEO was seen as a shortcut by marketers unwilling to do the hard work of actually making a product and a site that mattered. In that era, SEO was the quick way to get cheap traffic�cheap so you could afford to waste it."
What's infuriating to me is that he must've had a very bad date with a dishonest SEO/SEM company, because it was no "short time ago" in my book. As far as I could see, way back in the late 1990's when I was an SEO, there was trouble. I made no guarantee's to clients about how rich and famous they'd get when I was done because in many cases, their sites were in bad shape.
No amount of SEO hoola hoop manuvers was going to help them as long as their business requirements didn't have "Design it so customers can use it" written in there somewhere.
I'm not the only one who recognized the disconnect between marketing for search engines and design that sells. Nestled inside more and more companies are usability specialists working alongside web designers and SEO's. This trend is booming.
When my blog was selected by usability and web design tools software developers, TechSmith, as their Blog of the Month for February, they wondered if I'd write about this very topic.
Which I did, in Why Search Engine Marketing Has A Passion for Web Site Usability
It's not that I expect Seth Godin will read it. But it sure feels to pull out my pom poms once in awhile and cheer you all on.
