February 2007

Dave Pasternack dropped by again, this time to respond to my endorsement of Greg Boser’s elegant solution to the Threadwatch - Did-It SEO showdown. This Dave Pasternack seems to be getting desparate as it becomes obvious that he isn’t going to win this one.

Ironically, Greg has provided him with a respectable second place showing by getting the other contenders to drop out. While finishing second place for your own name is not much of an achievement, his Did-It bio was # 11 when Greg posted about the real Dave Pasternack. The other Dave’s bio on Did-It has risen to #2 after Todd, Michael Gray and IncrediBill, among others, decided to endorse Greg’s solution.

Dave describe my post as “ad hominem”, asserting that I attacked him rather than responded to his argument about professional SEO. The fact that Dave has spent so many hours responding to the Threadwatch SEO contest and failing to break the top 10 was an elegant, substantive demonstration that his argument was specious. Greg’s naturally sarcastic tone and clear contempt for anyone question the value of SEO resulted in a post that is arguably insulting, my comments, along with most of the comments by the SEO community, have been very constructive.

Dave, we may never be friends, but I implore you to grasp the olive branch that has been offered, swallow your considerable pride and admit that professional SEO consultants can provide great ROI for their clients…and even solve your reputation management problems. Then maybe you can get back to work, instead of trolling the blogophere all day trying to farm links from authors who disagree with you.

Greg Boser’s solution to the Dave Pasternack SEO contest shows he is not only one of the smartest guys around, he is also the classiest guerrilla in the contest. Greg has convinced the top contenders in the contest to stop worrying about who Did-It offend–instead they are linking to Award Winning Chef Dave Pasternack and pledged that if he wins, he will spend the money taking his friends to Dave’s New York restaurant, Esca.

Greg, I doubt this will be considered the best link you get, but I might suggest you make a reservation for 10 now. I hear that it is hard to get a table at Esca in any event and Aaron’s contest has made a bunch of us aware of where to go for the best seafood in New York. Meanwhile, if you invite me to join you, I will be sure to make sure the real Dave Pasternack knows that you really helped him out. If the other Dave is reading this, I suggest that Esca might be the perfect place to tell us all how sorry you are for being such a putz.

Google has been adding UI feature to its SERP’s lately by expanding on the One Box concept. This is a very powerful way to make inroads into some of the popular properties controlled by Yahoo, among others. In addition to the widely discussed addition of stock quotes showing up for a company search, they have also added a show times feature for movie searches.

Dave:

Thanks for stopping by and being so agreeable in your comments about the high ROI delivered by competent SEO professionals. You will make a lot of friends if you can maintain this tone.

After ten years of SEO and eight years of PPC, both in-house and for an agency, I want to point out that the people your comments actually hurt are not the professional SEO consultants. You may have annoyed us, but your not making our life more difficult. The damage you’re doing is to the in-house SEO folks who are fighting to justify the investment in time and money to attend conferences, buy tools, or hire a consultant to help achieve results.

I am sure you have spent a lot of time reading what people write about you and defending your reputation of late, so I offer the following suggestions.

1. Agree to Danny Sullivan’s call for a truce and clarify your position with an interview on Search Engine Expo.

2. Clearly recognize the difference between White Hat SEO - with a little gray matter - and “edgy SEO”.  If you want to blast edgy SEO tactics for established brands, the roar of agreement will almost match the shouts of indignation you caused so far.

Edgy techniques have high risk. A good SEO consultant should steer clients away from risk, or at least, show clients how to use affiliates systems to lower their risk.)

3. Answer Gord Hotchkiss’s excellent observations that you need SEO expertise because the search engines have no vested interest in companies succeeding in natural search.

4. Make the case for the business community that to be effective with in-house SEO, they can’t rely on programmers or web designers. They need skilled people who spend a significant amount of time every week keeping up with what’s going on in search.

Make the case that they need an SEO specialist who attends conference and stay up to date with the evolving world of search. Whether that person is in-house, a consultant, or an in-house person with a consultant on retainer doesn’t matter, but you seem to agree that they need to know what they are doing.

5. Tell Mark Simon, your VP of industry relations, that his utopian vision of a time when “won’t need you to tell them how relevant your page actually is, because they’ll understand it on their own” misses the point. Engines will only be able to understand what a site is about because SEO professionals have helped companies unlock the content they have hidden away in databases and clunky CMS systems by understanding information architecture, crawlers, and site usabilty.

Natural Search Marketing exists at the intersection of search engines and users. Most SEO consultants spend zero time reverse engineering Google, Yahoo or MSN; we’re too busy solving basic site issues and discovering huge opportunities hidden in the analytics.

6. Sponsor a ” That Other Dave Pasternack Says He’s Sorry party at SES NYC” and buy us all a drink! We may accept your apology and you can stop spending your days defending your reputation on hundreds of SEM blogs!

See You in New York.

And say hi to Kevin for us ☺

With all the rhetoric flying around about whether or not SEO is really hard…and by extension does it require an SEO consultant to do it right… the question of ROI hasn’t even been mentioned. The question for a business is does it make sense to invest in SEO?

SEMPO released it’s estimate for Search Engine Marketing for 2006. The key take away is that companies spent $9 billion. About $1 billion, or 12%, went to SEO and 88% went to PPC. Leaving aside all the questions about methodology, every one of our clients generates SIGNIFICIANTLY MORE than 12% of their revenue from SEO.

Dave Pasternack and Jason Calacanis have been making a lot of friends lately by talking about how easy SEO is and how more and more companies are bringing it in house. Both of these “experts” ignore the fact that doing SEO badly can be very expensive and can even get your site banned entirely. More importantly, both of their arguments miss the point. Businesses are recognizing that SEO offers the best ROI and they are investing in it.