SEO Does Have A Future

Now Shoemoney is a friend of mine, but regarding his post Designing With Web Standards before they give you a single markup or deck.

Until programmers and developers learn that cool widgety, pop-up, slide-out, spinning flaming skull javascript based mystery meat navigation is completely uncrawlable, and renders your website invisible to every search engine, and an SEO has to come in design a flat text based alternative navigation, SEO is alive and well. Until your programmers and developers learn that no matter how sexy the UI is, if your users and customers cant figure out what to do, SEO’s with a firm grasp on usability will always have a job. Want to solve that problem give everyone on your team a copy of Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed and stop thinking of search engines and the company website as an afterthought and SEO is always going to need to convince executives this interweb thing isn’t just a flash in the pan. Until companies start to realize they are slowly losing the ability to control the message and need to embrace that customers can control what the internet says about you, an SEO is always going to have to use techniques to address reputation management problems. Want to fix that problem start handing out copies of Seth Godin

Until Advertising and Copyrighting departments learn that the medium is shifting from a top down model to a more conversational one to one model, an SEO is going to have talk about content. Until companies start to understand you have to be more than brochure ware and solve someone’s problem if you want people to use and link to your site, and SEO is going have direct content creation. Want to solve that problem reread the clueless people like Clive Thompson realize that fame, ego, and cold hard cash can motivate people, you are going to need an SEO aware social media consultant to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot. Want to fix the problem read Made to Stick and politically incorrect is really an appealing to the linkerati. Want to fix the problem get them to read start considering SEO as part of their business plan from the start, an SEO is going to have to save a company from shooting itself in the foot at every turn. Want to fix the problem get everyone to read push the right buttons we are going to have these debates about SEO being dead or not. Until people realize just like good lawyers and bad lawyers get links from it, how to get attention, and how to turn them into billable accounts and hours? If you aren’t, and you are just in it for the drama, then you really aren’t an SEO, you’re an SEOFakester (&tm; sugarrae).