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A debate currently ranging through the Blogosphere concerns how the Initial founder of Weblogs, Inc (Jason Calacanis) recently compared all search engine marketers (he calls them optimizers) to low life spammers and considers SEO to mean ‘gaming the system’. The post is fairly boring and his use of profanities and sweeping generalizations undermines his point (even the media hasn’t taken him very seriously), but I thought it would be interesting to talk about why I think he believes this.

Somehow he’s drawn a nice line between search engine marketing (optimization) and internet marketing. He’s under the impression that “if you build it” they will come. That there is some difference between what an SEO does and what regular internet marketing entails like there is this huge difference and somehow by taking into account how search engines work, you have to be gaming the system.

I personally fail to see much of a difference. Most people use search engines as a starting point to find new services and products, so if you’re going to market a product or service online doesn’t it make sense to work in a core strategy for search engine rankings? You need to understand the traditional marketing end of it and the technology and certain critics have inaccurately separated the two. The words all have subjective meaning and it’s important that whatever firm or individual you hire to put together your strategy builds real value for you website visitors and helps you target the right customers. It’s not about raw traffic or spam; it’s about enabling businesses to succeed online by focusing on meeting the relevancy criteria the search engines set forth. It’s about making the web work as whole; this includes web design, link building, promotional services and social media marketing.

Trying to figure out how to get those most value from a market is creative and drives innovation on both sides. I believe it’s one of the core ingredients to a thriving competitive marketplace and results in better things for everyone. The statement about SEO’s being spammers could very well be changed to “internet marketers are all spammers” it’s that inaccurate.

Technorati Tags: search engine marketing, Jason Calacanis

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