Dave Pasternack hates SEO, why is that?

[Chad]

Dave doesn't hate SEO, he just thinks that SEO is not as complicated as some people make it out to be. Many SEO "experts" disagree and feel that he is belittling their craft. I personally think that this is a simple misunderstanding because the type of SEO that Dave is talking about is not at all the same as that which "SEO experts" are involved with.

What Dave considers to be "SEO" are the general "best practices" that allow a website to be seen and understood by search engines. This approach creates solid growth of traffic over time. With quality content and sensible site architecture, it reaches out for the "long tail" of less popular but much more numerous search phrases.

This approach is very different from hard-core traditional SEO which focuses on winning top positions for a few, highly competitive terms. Hard-core SEO is so competitive that winning those top positions often requires underhanded spammy techniques like IP cloaking, blog spamming and constantly answering questions on major portal websites. This is where SEO sometimes earns its dark reputation.

Ultimately, I tend to agree with Dave. Winning traffic from a large number of less popular keywords is much more stable than temporarily becoming "king of the hill" for a few highly competitive keywords.

Companies can build a vast flow of search engine traffic over time by simply making their websites present content with better clarity. This is not rocket science but just recognition that content must be presented in a way that search engines can understand.

If this interests you, I've put together a little SEO checklist here:

http://ezinedesigner.com/ecommerce-seo-checklist.html