I was out to lunch today with a fellow startup CEO who commented that our company (SEOmoz) was likely having a much harder time finding remarkable engineers to hire due to the negative perceptions about SEO as an industry and business practice. In his experience, even very smart, talented people from this background tended to have closed minds on this topic.<p>Since we specifically discussed the Hacker News community, I thought it valuable and worthwhile to post here and see if the community had opinions on the topic and, perhaps, could share ways in which we could help overcome it.<p>My sense is that HN is generally filled with smart, open-minded people who love applying science and technology to marketing (or any other problem), yet SEO (and web marketing as a whole) seems to attract derision, often without context.<p>Love to hear your thoughts.<p>---<p>RE our specific situation: We're hiring primarily for folks to work on our web crawl, processing & machine learning platforms (as well as some front-end applications that plug into these systems). A good comparison would be Google's/Yahoo!'s/MS's teams in the early days working on 50 billion+ page indices, metric construction, crawling, serving, etc. We've heard that these are typically interesting, sexy problems, but that the "SEO" industry bias is working against us.
Here is why I would never personally work for an SEO company: (Obviously just my opinion, with all the bias that carries)<p>Search engines are very interesting, technologically. Optimizing a search engine would be extremely interesting. Optimizing websites to keep up with the changes of somebody else's business (the search engine) is not interesting.<p>You're playing catch-up. You essentially attempting to reverse engineer interesting problems, and applying methods to take advantage of the internals of those algorithms for your customers.<p>In 1999 you would have been wildly successful telling people they could put a ton of keywords on their website, using the same font color as their site background color to boost ranking without affecting user-visible content. That worked, for a while. Then it didn't. The technology to "optimize" content for search engines have changed, but the concepts are still the same. You're trying to game the system, and I personally don't find that interesting nor rewarding.
The biggest issue is the difference between:<p>SEO=link farming, spamming blogs, generated blogs/sites, etc...<p>SEO=building accessible standards compliant markup, making it easy for people to find content they were actually looking for, etc...<p>My gut reaction to hearing "SEO Company" makes me think of #1, even though I know "good" SEO is really just good page development, good content, good use of keywords, etc... As an engineer I'd prefer to hear about standards compliant markup, accessible (508/WAI), canonical URLs, clear DOM structure, and developing content to better serve users: which is really what it's all about.
I think HN is gradually, gradually warming to SEO. I remember way back when I was lurking here someone had a comment along the lines of they would be a hired assassin prior to doing SEO consulting. These days folks discuss SEO strategy here with some regularity, and it generally doesn't cause vitriolic reactions when it is perceived as non-manipulative.<p>I think it is a matter of continuing to demonstrate very basic things such as "SEO works", "SEO will make your business money", and "SEO is not black magic voodoo practiced by a bunch of ebook selling charlatans who will teaching you to Make Money Online".<p>If I were trying to get a bunch of savvy startups on board with SEO, I'd be banging the drum on how SEO is an absurdly effective force multiplier for startups, small businesses, and other resource-constrained entities who have agility, deep technical knowledge, personality, a story to tell, and all the other unfair advantages that warm me to my blackened SEO heart. If you're doing business on the Internet, you're almost certainly critically dependent on SEO these days. (Some businesses more critically than others: I could imagine B2B with horrifically long sales cycles that get very little accomplished online not worrying about SEO too much, and Facebook/iPhone apps get a pass in today's market. But for selling B2C or B2SmallBusiness web applications? Crikey, SEO is about as important as issues get.)<p>Oh, and educating people about what SEOs actually do for a living helps. (I mentioned at the time, too, but I really liked the presentation to YC about it.) Except, don't mention the roasted baby parties. I don't think they're ready for roasted baby. We'll start with kitty milkshakes and work our way up gradually.
Let me explain why I have learned to hate SEO over the years.<p>I'm writing this from a throwaway HN account. I work for a 4-year old company, where I was one of the first 3 employees. We have a very popular website that gets over 400 million page views per month. We get lots of traffic from Google. When I started, our priority was making a great, simple user interface. But we were also very aware of SEO, and paid much attention to self-links we put on the site, anchor text, URL parameters, all the usual smart SEO stuff. So far so good -- we did this opportunistically, and never at the expense of the user experience.<p>As we grew, we hired a person dedicated to SEO (a non-programmer). Then we hired another. These SEO people started having us add links and pages in strange places that made no sense to actual users. And adding links that sometimes made sense to users, but were unnecessary, and cluttered the user interface. The page footer grew and grew, eventually spanning 3 lines. We added funny redirect schemes that made the site slower for users. We were afraid of our links to other sites because we might leak valuable "Google juice". We added redundant tooltips that were useless to users. Many of these tactics were crap our SEO people read on some webmaster SEO forum, with no scientific basis. Sometimes our SEO people even had the gall to say "I have an idea I think will be better for the user experience", and go on to propose something that only benefited SEO, and made the user experience worse! In other words, they would focus on GETTING the user (via Google), but forgot about KEEPING the user (through good user experience). Thankfully, we never did the black-hat methods like cloaking, but some things very close were proposed and met with loud opposition from our developers.<p>For a long time I would fight against these changes, because they made the UI worse. I lost most of these battles because it was hard to convince the managers that it was hurting the site (but it never seemed to be necessary for the SEO people to prove it was actually helping SEO). I was eventually spending so much energy fighting these SEO proposals that I just gave up. User interface designers and developers spend a lot of effort to make a web site look good and run fast. Then the SEO people go and fuck it up. It's very frustrating for developers. I know SEO is important. All I'm saying is that SEO should never be at the expense of the user experience. I hate what it has done to our web site, and I know it's happened to other websites as well.
I'm a software engineer, and I've been browsing seattle.craigslist.org recently looking for something new. Your ads hit enough of my keywords to pop up in my search, but I move right past as soon as I see the letters "SEO". Maybe your company actually is awesome and totally working for the betterment of the world, but you've chosen a label for yourselves that was invented to describe the bad guys.<p>Your ad could hold my attention longer by dropping the term "SEO", but I'd still decide you were probably just a bunch of spammers as soon as I saw the words "improve their rankings in search engines". I don't want sites to come up in search engines because someone paid a lot of money to put them there; I want sites to come up in search engines because they are a good match for what I'm trying to find. If you're gaming Google, you're making the Internet less useful, and there's no way I could work for you in good conscience.<p>Now, maybe what you're actually doing isn't so much gaming Google as it is teaching your customers how to build good web sites. Maybe you're teaching them to write good headlines, use quality hyperlinks, add a lot of useful, interesting content, get content out from behind paywalls and flash blobs, and so on; or maybe you've come up with some fascinating statistical analysis that lets people know how searchable their content is. If so, that's great: but why drag yourselves down with the poisoned label "SEO"? It's like calling yourselves "SpamWorks", or "BotNetMasters", or advertising your skills at obfuscating Cialis ads.<p>Web marketing attracts derision because web marketers make the Internet suck. Maybe you're a step above the spammers of the world, but you're not helping your case by marketing yourselves under their label.
SEO makes it harder for people to find useful information on the web instead of what someone spent time and money to "optimize" for Google. Developers know this, and so generally dislike SEO.
I deal with this a lot. I think there are 3 problems:<p>a) the underlying need for SEO is equivalent to the underlying need for taxes. Or apartment brokers. Or other hated but essential intermediaries. SEO is a necessary lubricant, but in a perfect world, it doesn't exist.<p>b) the context SEO operates in is derivative, not fundamental. SEO may need to deal with 50b+ indexes, but the context is <i>not</i> google. The context is parasitic.<p>c) the business model and ROI calculations of many SEO companies are self-serving, magical, non-scientific, and non-provable. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with SEO people where I suggest doing an experiment, and all I hear are crickets and fear.
At our last weekly meeting, we were discussing implementing SEO. My gut reaction was to question the decision to work with snake oil salesmen. Luckily, I thought before I spoke.<p>I think SEO needs a new acronym to differentiate between spammy abuse SEO and site structure/good practices. Maybe Search Engine Readability? Search Engine Compatibility?
Here's why I loathe SEO (the term and the industry):<p>It shouldn't exist. There's "good" and "bad" SEO. "Bad" SEO is snake oil, it's cheating, it's gaming the system for commercial purposes. It's a race to the bottom to see who can screw up their UX and the Internet in general the most to get the most clicks from Google. It's evil.<p>"Good" SEO, though, is nothing but common sense. Search engines emphasise good structure, semantics, accessibility and practises, and this is what "good" SEO takes advantage of. But good developers know if you're doing your job in the first place, there's no need for "good" SEO. That's why we don't like SEO; it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. If you can somehow stealthily introduce good practises in the guise of SEO, then I guess that's good, but we cringe at the thought of having to label it like that to get acceptance.
Perhaps your first problem is that there isn't even a "Careers" or "Jobs" link on your homepage, and Googling "seomoz jobs" and "seomoz careers" leads to a job board and not your company's hiring page?<p>Seriously, I am interested in hearing about your machine learning openings, and I can't even find the job description anywhere.
I've worked in SEO for 6 years (I'm an SEO copywriter), and I know there's good and bad in the industry, as in any industry. In SEO, I think the biggest problem is a lack of respect for the audience. That's why you get sites with poor usability, as described by throwaway123 below. But it's not always the SEOs who are responsible for that. Remember, they're being paid by someone. Yes, there are times when the SEO's client DOESN'T understand the impact of the SEO they're commissioning. But there are also times when they do. It's easy to blame the practitioners here, and often that blame is justified. But we only have to look around us to remember that business -- big or small -- is generally far more interested in short term gain than long term customer satisfaction. So it should come as no surprise that many businesses are prepared to turn a blind eye to practices that hinder usability and visitor value.<p>The other common problem in SEO is ineptitude. Many people call themselves SEOs when really they're just opportunistic freelancers and entrepreneurs. Their SEO knowledge is poor and their business management skills lacking. This ultimately impacts EVERYONE connected with the job, even those only remotely connected (like the good SEOs out there).
Sadly, SEO is a loaded and abused term. A lot of SEO is helpful, making your site friendlier to search engine tools. But the term also tends to include less above-board efforts, such as search engine exploitation, gaming the system, all the way to web spam, link farms, content scraping, etc. At this point it's probably better to just come up with a different term than attempt to reclaim SEO from the exploiters.
I see hackernews SEO articles quite frequently, i even submitted one that did quite well: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270748" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270748</a> so i think you're on the right track by asking here. That being the case, why don't you just edit your post and include a "we're hiring" link! Aside from that diving into the technical details "sexy problems" first in any type of job listing may prove helpful since it sounds more like they'll be very technically involved.<p>If the SEO moniker is really really hurting your prospects, consider creating a shell company such as Initech (generic and tech related) when posting and wait till they're warmed up to the technology before you tell them it will be for SEO. In all honesty though i think you would be better off finding someone not only excited about the sexy problems, but someone who is interested in SEO...maybe harder and longer but would pay off in the long run...if you figure out a good answer to your own problem, then let us know!
Hi Rand,<p>At Pear Analytics, we haven't experienced that at all. In fact, most developers will tell you that they no nothing about SEO anyway, so I'm not sure where the bias would come from. Engineers are attracted to solving problems they've never solved before. We've had plenty of issues dealing with external API's, Google's ridiculousness, queuing systems, data storage and more - yet they continue to find ways to get around these issues.<p>You guys seem to be located where there is a wealth of talent, and with your success - I am surprised finding the engineers you need is difficult.<p>I would say keep the focus less on the SEO, and more on the solution/problem you are trying to solve, and making it sexy to the end user. Maybe that will get some attention.<p>Ryan Kelly
Rand - It sure seems like you're recruiting sophisticated application engineers, you're not recruiting SEO engineers. That is, this is a recruiting problem (yours) not a perception problem (theirs).<p>Focus your headline on the sexy work you're recruiting the engineers for, not the market your customers are in. Why mention SEO at all in your recruiting?<p>Oo turn it on it's head and address the fear in your recruiting efforts. Like, "how can a gig as awesome as this possibly be found in the slimy, shady underworld of search engine optimization? mwahaha."<p>Maybe I'm biased because I'm an SEOmoz client, but I'd imagine that once they get past the initial hurdle that your firm doesn't fit a preconception about SEO anyway. So get em over that initial bump.
Rand I believe you should consider your company a "Search, and Analytics" company more so than an SEO company due to the context/bias that SEO has. The scope of work that SEOmoz does is quite a bit beyond traditional SEO work etc.
Sometimes a term becomes so strongly associated with unethical behavior that it can't be used in a more positive context. I think this is true for "SEO". In theory there should be no cognitive bias against the idea of optimizing a site design to make it easily searchable; but historically this term is associated with shady practices.<p>One of your comments states that you want to make "SEO" a brand people respect. I don't think this is going to happen in the short term, when the experienced engineers you want to hire remember cursing the unethical behavior of other SEO practitioners.
Very interesting question. We founded Plug in SEO a year ago and at the time came up against lots of anti-SEO prejudice. The scene has definately changed, at least here in the UK. The prejudge has been replaced with robust questions about its benefit.<p>As for recruitment, if your SEO solution is genuinely an arms race of outmanouvering search engines, as an engineer myself I'd have passed over the opportunity. Personally I relish solving problems but not reinventing the wheel or gaming search engines.
As a coder, I would enjoy those problems. Maybe its a framing issue-if you frame the jobs as you did here, rather than "work for an SEO company", maybe that would help?
SEOMoz is a reputable company and love going there for all types of SEO information. The community is large and growing larger. Most people are searching for SEO related solutions for Wordpress blogs and I think the best solution so far is.. <a href="http://www.seodestination.com/wp-seo/" rel="nofollow">http://www.seodestination.com/wp-seo/</a> any other tips?
As a programmer at a fairly high traffic site, SEO is a way of life for us and we always think of SEO implications. The more difficult problem we have lately is the SEO vs user experience trade off. We dislike whenever SEO is chosen over the user experience.