Towards a New Philosophy of SEO

I am interested in hearing views regarding campaign goals from the SEO perspective. Specifically I feel that the common underlying goal of most SEO campaigns is to take a website and make it appear to be the most relevant/important/authoritative, without regard for the actual quality of the website.
What I am attempting to define is a position that seeks to create websites that are in fact the most relevant/important/authoritative within their topical community (Or at least represent the highest level of relevance that they can hope to achieve). These websites would be created/re-vamped with a goal of achieving top rankings, however they would do so because:
-They are constructed as comprehensive authorities within their industry.
-They are designed to make the most of their natural strengths through an understanding of search technologies.
-They are built upon a foundation of extremely comprehensive research designed to illustrate what it takes to be the best within their industry.

Any Thoughts?

Campaign goals of SEO are:
- get the site noticed by the SEs
- get spidered
- get a deep crawl
- get placement in the SERPs
- get better placement in the SERPs

The way you do this is with quality content, clean code and BLs.

I think you may be confusing site goals with seo goals. SEO = Search Engine Optimization. It is simply getting your web sites to work well with the SEs.

The site goal may be an authority, or try to be anyway. The site may leverage the companies stregths - but that is because of convenience and expense.

Very few web sites have a context larger than themselves. But that doesn't matter to SEO.

I am realizing that the appearance of a site can have a very large impact on its credibility and conversion rate. And I am in the process of defining new designs for my most important sites. I agree with you 100% on your basic idea.

This is the only part of your post that I have concern with...


... anyone who is on the site seriously to buy, to read, to learn or be entertained with quickly see that the content is weak - they will not buy, or read far, or learn much or be entertained... and especially not give a natural link.

IMO what you suggest has enormous benefit to a good site that simply has a shabby look, but weak content dipped in chocolate is still weak content.

I am taking a new approach to SEO that really has a similar philosophy to much of what you write. See the first link of my sig. You may have comments that will help me.

I think that these two can not be separated, site goals and SEO goals. IMO the goals of the site can help the SEO as much as the SEO can help the goals of the site. The most powerful tool for SEO is links and that can be a top goal of the site design.

It's that square is a rectangle thing.

A site goal may be SEO. SEO is not the design or focus of the site. It works with those things (hopefully) but is not them.

A goal may be 20,000 visitors. You will get this through several methods including SEO.
A goal may be getting a Webby for "best design". SEO may draw more attention to the site to get it recognized but once there, the design must stand on its own.
A goal may be 20% conversion. SEO won't help you there. Conversion doesn't start until the visitor has already reached the site.
A goal may be to get top 20 placement in Y! SEO will help you there.
A goal may be to have each page load in less than 6 seconds. SEO won't help that (though that may help SEO!).

They do work together but SEO is purely for the benefit of the SEs. Everything else should be for the benefit of the visitors.

In it's simplest format SEO is getting some page on top of SERPS for specific search phrase. Period. Nothing more, nothing less. You can't talk about design, content, quality or anything else in this context. It is just and only about being #1.


In more complex solutions SEO adapts part of a larger scheme known as business enviroment. In this case you have to know your customers marketing, sales, management etc. plans and make your SEO support those activities. When you get there, the goals of SEO will be a part of entire business goals. If SEO aims for different target/goal than the actual business, then there will be huge troubles.

I'm certainly trying to reconcile the site goals vs. SEO goals view. Thanks for the input.

Thanks for the great input. This is actually an area of great interest for me along with business ethics as they apply to e-commerce. My website deals with a lot of my work on the two subjects.

Thanks for the input.
I think that what I'm finding is that strict SEO in and of itself may be on the outs. More often companies are seeking a more robust solution that incorporates SEO in the traditional sense as well as a variety of other complimentary strategies. What I seem to be spending a good deal of my time doing is trying to develop a greater seamlessness between SEO and complimentary services.

I agree completely. I'm finding that viewing various aspects of SEO as business goals in the traditional sense, has afforded me the opportunity to develop really innovative solutions. For example by viewing targeted search phrases as business goals in and of themselves.