[KabuseCha]

In my opinion: It's neither ethical nor necessary!

There are easier ways to get a website ranked. Publishing good and useful content, creating a valuable product, optimizing your site (for crawlers and users), and following a sane marketing strategy is much more important than backlinks and page rank. I never had any problems outranking poorly made sites that had a much "stronger" link-profile than my sites.

Needless to say: You will also build a better product/business if you do not waste your focus on cheap SEO-tricks ...

But I do not judge people using these tactics: SEO is daunting-game and - as long as Google acts as intransparent and unpredictable as it has in the past - people will focus on "esoteric" tactics.

[_carl_jung]

> Publishing good and useful content, creating a valuable product

I follow a lot of indie game development forums, and one of the most striking things to me is how many people want to hit success with garbage casual mobile games by focusing heavily on app store tips and tricks.

[itwy]

This sounds like a diplomatic answer so you don't get downvoted. You say you are "technical-SEO consultant" then you say SEO tricks are useless and one should only create good contents and SEO will take care of itself. What are you useful for then (as a consultant)?

[LeifCarrotson]

Because people need to be told this. Over and over again.

A highly-paid medical doctor saying "You need to eat less and exercise more to lose weight" is not unexpected. The problem is that people really want to eat crap and not exercise and still be healthy.

I (an industrial controls engineer) worked on a website for my employer's small business some years ago. I was given about 40 hours to design and implement the website to describe some 200 products that we've built over the years. Some had pictures, and some even had manuals. Most had some kind of a spreadsheet entry, but between Google (now Open) Refine and some intern hours we had a product page for each. "Magic algorithmic keyword SEO juice" was the desired strategy, such that each product page ought to zoom to the top of Google results for its search term, and I (not being a technical SEO consultant) was unable to effectively convince my boss that hiding 100 copies of the title and thesaurus-generated synonyms in white-on-white text at 0 point at the bottom of the page was not the way to do it, and that linking to it from a useful and therefore popular page would work better.

A lot of small businesses view documentation as pure overhead, to be minimized at all costs. The idea that you'd have a project manager or engineer write up the email you sent (or phone call you narrated) describing how to calibrate an XYZ blagometer, copy edit it, add some diagrams, and post it as an article or whitepaper to improve future sales is viewed as wasteful and not worth the effort.

The SEO industry is like the weight loss industry. When you hear an SEO consultant advocate creating good content, that means they're one of the good ones. If you hear them describe miracle cures, they're a hack.

[KabuseCha]

Hello - good question!

Technical SEO - as I use the term - describes tasks like the following:

1) Performance optimization (One of the most important tasks)

It's basically me telling my clients that their Devs were right all along and that they have to improve their site's speed

2) UX feedback (Help in terms of usability and user experience because unusable sites will rank much worse on Google)

This is basically me telling my clients that their "fancy" 200.000 $ redesign will never rank in Google and that they have to use a "boring" design. (Their Devs were right again ...)

3) Improve internal linking (Prioritize important pages with high search volume, deprioritize less important pages)

More complicated, but this is one of the most important tasks for "big" websites (e-commerce, news, travel, ...) and one of the biggest levers to improve rankings

4) manage URL-corpus

One of my clients' had every single article of his indexed on more than 5 different URLs (eg. https://www.website.com/correct-url, https://www.website.com/correct-url/, https://www.website.com/correct-url?preview, https://www.website.com/correct-url/?preview,https://www.web..., https://www.website.com/?1234). Each URL hat internal links pointing to it, so the domain's "power" was split through hundreds of thousands of URLs. Google hates this and traffic exploded after fixing this.

...

A lot of other related tasks are not that easy to explain for me in text (I am a non-native English speaker and this comment already took me 20 minutes up until here ...) and my guidelines vary from website to website.

But, essentially, I help clients to adhere to web standards and optimize their websites for their users. The last "spammy" backlink I build for a project other than my side-projects (experiments) was probably more than 5 years ago ...

[graeme]

Do you have a website or contact info for hiring? I'm interested. You can reach me at the email in my profile if you prefer.

[itwy]

That makes sense. Thanks for clearing up the confusion.

[chipotle_coyote]

you say SEO tricks are useless

SEO tricks are useless, but that's not the same as saying SEO is useless:

> optimizing your site (for crawlers and users), and following a sane marketing strategy

That's a lot of what (non-jerky) SEO is these days.

One can argue that it's not something worth hiring an SEO consultant for, as there's enough info floating around out there to do this yourself if you're moderately savvy. But there are folks who aren't savvy about that sort of thing, as well as folks who think it's just worth paying someone else to worry about it.