[motherwell]

Bah! What dross.

This is the same BS that gets spewed about everything "If you have a great product, you don't need marketing", "If you're a great writer, you don't need an editor" etc etc

A web designer / developer is someone who builds web pages and/or sites. They can be good designers, bad, indifferent. They can know some SEO, none, or all of it. They can focus on server code, front end code or both, again to varying degrees.

But SEO != web designer is simple to prove: if I rank 10000000 for a term, the web designer still did his job :)

Whether this mythical "you" needs to hire an SEO expert or not depends on so many things.

And lastly this comment is just bizarre: "Social media is rapidly becoming much more important than Google." Seriously? Really? The $$ made from a Social Media click > an SEO click? Seriously dude, you need to get you some Google analytics and an ecommerce site.

Social Media is to SEO what a park is to a mall. People may prefer parks, they may prefer having fun, but when they want to buy, they go to the mall, and most smart businesses would surely rather be situated in the mall.

[gaius]

The point is that there are only two ways to "optimize" your site: 1) hire a better designer and 2) game the ranking algorithms. The latter is what SEO "experts" do. From the search engine's perspective, they want their ranking to accurately match which site is most useful and relevant to their user. The ideal search engine, once things like location are discounted (a brilliantly designed site offering a useful service too far away from me is a bad search result) is going to rank on how good the site actually is.

[pbhjpbhj]

So is, say, a better onsite link structure, an optimised description on each page, SERP indented listing, ... (1) or (2).

I suppose you wouldn't hire a UI expert for a GUI program either?

a brilliantly designed site offering a useful service too far away from me is a bad search result

How far is too far? Depends what you're buying right? That's a complex algo. How about if you happen to be travelling there anyway? How does the SE know? What if it's the only place in your country that sells it, would you go further now?

[ubernostrum]

I'm confused. Nowhere in the article did I see a recommendation against doing any marketing at all; instead I saw a quite sensible debunking of a bunch of snake oil that's known either not to work or to actively hurt your site's visibility in search engines.

Effective marketing is a good thing. Wasting money on crap? Not so much.