Thanks to my newfound Twitter account, Andy Beal pointed me(us) to an article, that referenced him, in which he referenced a Popular Mechanics aricle in which 20 questions were asked of Udi Manber, Vice President of Search for Google, describing his thoughts on the current state of search, and its future. (I had to rewrite that sentence 3 times, make sure it makes sense). One fo the questions asked of Udi, and his answer, was in my mind another vote for the validaty of SEO as an industry and service. I will touch on that in just one moment, but first, why this is important.

There is often a lot of talk about SEO as an un-needed service, often shouted by «big name» bloggers selling the idea that if you write quality, people will come. It’s the same song by most of them, but that simply isn’t the truth. There are many quality blogs out there that never see the light of a visitor, simply because Google will not rank an unfriendly URL and duplicate content ridden site, with the same title tag on every page. So, what does Udi think?

When asked:

Do you find that the content on the Web is evolving to be more search-engine friendly?

Udi Responds with:

It’s hard to say. It’s definitely still lacking. I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages.

To me, Udi is asking website publishers to focus more on the idea that a machine has to determine a content’s intent in order to return it to a certain searcher. This thought is shared by BusinessWeek as shown by the title of the article they wrote; ‘Google’s Manber: Learn to think like machines.’ This is a vote for SEO in my eyes.

Most of my clients are pretty busy (you know, with running a business and all) and dedicating large portions of their life figuring out a search engine isn’t exactly a smart move for them. So what do they do? They call me (or one of my qualified peers out there in the SEO world).

Most of us aren’t trying to trick a search engine into ranking glory. We aren’t pushing seperate content to the SE than we would a visitor (unless done so in Google friendly ways). We are simply optimizing a website, helping a client produce more quality content, and appealing to the search engines in the way they want to have it.

We often get into love spats with Google and their opinions (try not to get Michael Gray started), but sometimes we are actually on the same page. And it helps to validate our services and industry.

With this, and any other post, please read the disclaimer.