Does…someone involved with Engadget work on SEO (search engine optimization)?

No. We don’t do any SEO. I don’t believe in SEO.

–from the interview in Michael Banks’ book Blogging Heroes with Peter Rojas, founder of Engadget–a site whose Googe rankings most Web publishers would kill for.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t discount traditional search engine optimization techniques out of hand. At their best, they can help, and there are such things as poorly-optimized Web sites that don’t get all the traffic they could.

But SEO of the traditional sort is one one of a long list of things you can do to introduce people to your conent. And for most sites–especially smaller ones–I’m convinced that it’s nowhere near the top of that list.

Technologizer is a far smaller tech site than Engadget, but it’s growing rapidly–in September, its second full month of operation, it received around 400,000 unique visitors who generated 950,000 page views. (That’s according to WordPress Stats; I also use Federated Media’s tracking pixel and Google Analytics, both of which report numbers which are a bit lower…which is a subject for another post.) I’ve done almost no traditional SEO, other than to pick a platform (WordPress) that’s SEO-friendly in the first place and to remember to use the names of things I write about in the headlines (tricky, huh). Despite that, I’m doing fine in Google results, sometimes outranking humongous sites that lavish attention on SEO.

Here’s why:

–Google is not an idiot. It is, in fact, generally remarkably smart about figuring out the topic of your content. Stuffing your pages with keywords in a desperate attempt to rise to the top of its rankings is the equivalent of shouting at an intelligent friend at the top of your lungs.

–The best way to rise to the top of Google results is to write something useful that nobody else has. Especially if your site is small and/or new. It’s certainly a faster strategy for success than trying to be the Internet’s top site for a search like “notebook reviews” or “health,”  which will put you in competition with major sites that have a decade’s head start on you. Example: RealNetworks’ RealDVD was released today, and if you Google for “RealDVD Review” you’ll find–at least as I write this–that Technologizer’s review is the top one on Google. I didn’t accomplish this through brilliant SEO. I accomplished this through being one of the few people who bothered to review a signficant product from a large company, and posting my review last week in order to get a head start.

–Search engines may not be your best source of traffic. My strategy with Technologizer wasn’t to be on the front page of Google–although I am, in many cases–but to be a site that started conversations that other bloggers and sites would find interesting enough to link to, and which had traction with news aggregtors and social media sites such as Google News, Techmeme, Slashdot, Digg, Macsurfer, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Hacker News. Traditional SEO doesn’t help here and can actively damage your site’s chances of success, since it may lead you to dumb down your content and render it bland and generic. Who wants to link to a site that’s bland and generic? It’s far more important to write for people than for machines.

–Getting linked to by sites other than search engines is the best kind of SEO. Google’s whole PageRank algorithm was founded on the idea that the search engine should emphasize sites that a lot of other sites link to. Focus on doing stuff that other people like and want to link to, and your Google results will improve correspondingly.

–Google enjoys foiling tricky attempts at SEO. In some cases, it and other search engines actively work to ignore techniques that SEO firms recommend. And if Google decides to do something, it usually succeeds.

–Nobody knows anything. William Goldman said that about the movie business, but it’s equally true of SEO. Google does disclose some techniques that will help your cause, and it makes sense to know them. But for the most part, it’s secretive about its special sauce–and that special sauce’s recipe is subject to continuous change. Devote a lot of energy to applying a surefire SEO technique to your site, and Google may make a change that renders it irrelevant before you’re done…if it ever worked in the first place.

I said this a few sentences ago, but it bears repeating: It always, always, always makes sense to concentrate on writing for people, not for machines. My deep belief in that proposition is one of the things that led me to found Technologizer–and so far, it’s paying off.