Dave Pasternack hates SEO, why is that?

[Ran R]

I keep reading that Dave Pasternack hates SEO, or search engine optimization. My company is looking to hire someone for this type of work but on a news article he states that it is useless and any one can do it. That I should just sign up an account with something called Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. Everytime I search around to see who Dave Pasternack is I keep coming across sites that talk about cakes and chefs.

[Irishtek]

I have experience with SEO work.

Signing up for Google adwords and Yahoo search marketing can help you generate visitors to your site but that is not enough for SEO.

1) It does not guarantee that the person coming in will provide revenue to your site.
2) Someone does have to monitor which ads are being chosen and which are not.
3) Someone has to know the value of the chosen ads.
4) This same person has to be able to adjust the ads regularly to optimize profit for the site.
5) Neither approach will get you a high rank in regards to SEO. (There may be benefit towards SEO - but it's not the sole answer)
6) SEO requires work of the person monitoring the ads in coordination with the developer of the site for success.
7) Success doesn't always mean profit. I have seen a site draw in 2000 new visitors a month, and not make a sale. I've worked with other sites that spend $20,000/month but their site sells $60,000+ due to these ads.
8) This work, whether anyone can do it or not - doesn't matter. It's a full-time job (maybe more depending on the site)

If you have questions feel free to email me: irishtek@yahoo.com

[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