Former Weblogs, Inc and AOL executive Jason Calacanis gave today's keynote at SES Chicago. Along with his talk, he decried SEO practices as BS and said sites need to focus on great content instead of trying to game search engines.

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UGGHH!

Why do some think SEO is still about gaming the search engines?

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KBK Marketing | Jaan Kanellis Search Marketing Blog | Be the best and a link is what you'll get!

How is it that SEO isnt just about following a set of rules to make your page rank higher than others? Its a competition between everyone and there are shortcuts and such that everyone wants to know about, even if they dont use them because the risks are too high. It does seem like a crazy kind of rat race, and the winners sometimes have the crappiest pages, aesthetically, and content wise. Granted its getting better with the content being more of what you were searching for instead of just the grabbag of words people put in their content tags...

I'm relatively new to the SEO scene,(I'm more into graphics or hardware) and I'd love to be more educated about SEO, so if you all would like to help me understand where my thinking is wrong, please do!

~r

In its simplest form, on-site SEO pretty much are multiple sets of rules for accessibility of users and spiders. The off-site SEO seems to be more customized. Utilizing social networking, link baiting and any number of other ways to gain effect back links is the creative part.

Now some websites simply already have plenty of links. If that is the case then it comes back to the on-site factors. You start looking at how users interact with the website, what is the shopping cart experience like? What pages are users spending the most time on. Why? Etc, etc, etc.

When I first took at a prospects website all these various things are flying around my head.

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KBK Marketing | Jaan Kanellis Search Marketing Blog | Be the best and a link is what you'll get!