I'm sick of SEO people pointing the finger at "evil" SEO people. SEO is basically gaming search engines instead of contributing anything of value. It's not a respectable business, it's a self-perpetuating protection racket. If there weren't any SEO people we wouldn't need any SEO people.
You only hire an SEO for one of two reasons: 1) too cheat Google, and 2) to compete with all the other sites that hire SEO's... There isn't an ethical element in this whole equation.
I have to disagree with you at one level. Yes, a lot of SEO is pure crap. Agreed.
Where SEO is of value is in helping those who do not understand how the internet works optimize their sites to have them be more relevant. Perhaps a new term ought to be coined. Something like SRO (Site Relevance Optimization)?
Anyone with even a basic understand of what search engines are looking for (or trying to do) has come across sites that just make you want to cry due to the lost opportunities. A lot of these are smaller local shops that just don't have the tech and marketing horsepower to deal with it.
Being in the business of advising business owners on such things as posting content-relevant articles, carefully choosing titles and related tags, etc. is not evil at all. This is actually a good wholesome service.
SRO (or whatever) is what most sites should be doing. Ranking higher would come as a side-effect of SRO.
At its root, legitimate SEO means making your site easy for a search engine to understand. It's easy, if you're tech savvy, to forget that even the simple techniques that legitimate SEO comprises are beyond most business owners, and simply aren't performed by most web designers and developers. So there is a niche for decent people to do SEO. Unfortunately, competitive pressure drives a lot of unethical practices in the field.
SEO is like wanting to win in sports, everybody wants to be first. You do SEO becaus you want to become number one in google search results. Nothing wrong with that.
SEO people are like sports coaches. You have good coaches and bad coaches. Good coaches will help you with an effective training programs, and analyze the competition. Bad coaches will tell you to use drugs.
Good SEO people will help you win by improving your site and inbound links, bad SEO people will help you to win by cheating.
SEO defenders argue that despite GoogleBing's claims of trying to rank based on user experience, in practice there are ranking signals that have nothing to do with user experience, and therefore "bad" SEO is justified to optimize those extraneous signals. They don't help improve the site; they improve search rankings, though, and until GoogleBing do away with those extraneous signals, you have to play the SEO game or you'll get beaten by equivalent-quality sites who do.
I too prefer improving a site rather than gaming search engines, and I've argued against SEO consultants who want to do things like keyword-stuff urls, but now I sympathize with the pro-"bad"-SEO argument even though I prefer not to get involved in that kind of SEO.
so you're saying the best website should win without "cheating" right? its not that simple.
you could make the same argument about all advertising/marketing.
the best product should win on its own standards, without advertising, right? for example, wouldn't we all have better insurance rates if geico, progressive and esurance didn't have to spend their money on advertising?
But the truth is these insurance companies are disrupting old school insurance models that are less efficient and bringing value to more consumers faster with their advertising.
companies adapt, consumers adapt, markets adapt, search engines adapt. companies and people are going to work toward their self interest, and SEO is one way to do this. its called capitalism.
As always, there is a thin line between cheating and being ethical.
You know... marketing by itself is not unethical, though when you use tricks to induce people to buy something even though you know it's not good for them, the line is crossed. Like when a large fast food restaurant starts giving toys away if you buy their food... inducing children to annoy their parents so they buy unhealthy food just to get the toys. Or when you show sports people smoking a cigarrete, linking the image of smoking with a healthy life.
Of course, if all that matters is making money, then cheating the search engines (or peoples perception, in the case of marketing) is fine.
You only hire an SEO for one of two reasons: 1) too cheat Google, and 2) to compete with all the other sites that hire SEO's... There isn't an ethical element in this whole equation.