The post was on the future of public relations, and where PR was headed. One of the explored paths, a scorched wasteland of a future, was SEO. Since my opinion on SEO is really a matter of public record, I disagreed. I said it was an oasis in the desert; drink it up and we (the PR profession) will find it was all just hot sand.

Cue mini-shitstorm. In the next 24 hours, I would brave the following:

• Having it suggested that my clients should be pitied.
• Being told what I was doing, spreading misinformation, was “shameful.”
• Being called a liar and a scammer.
• Being called a fucktard. (I’m happy to see the term has moved beyond the juvenile gaming community and into the real world. I always liked the word when I was thirteen.)

More often than anything else, I was called ignorant. Guilty as charged. I’m completely ignorant as to what SEO folks do. But I felt less bad about it when I figured out that– Surprise!– everybody else is too.

SEO guys don’t actually do anything

I should qualify this with a …that other professions don’t already do better. But I’m prone to dramatic statements, so let’s go with it.

Let’s start with the term search engine optimization. This used to be a really innocent term but, like the cast of Jersey Shore, it somehow got caught up in something bigger than itself.

The basic way of doing it meant tweaking a site to comply with (or better comply with) major search engines. If I could go back in time and shift the mighty river that is the meaning of a word, I’d keep it to this:

Search engine optimization: Optimizing your website (and only your website) to more easily be read by search engines.

NOTE: I should note here that SEO has also evolved to have a second meaning as well, a word that tries to quantify the effect that backlinks bring.  Some people call this “link juice” too. This post is only concerned with the term that pertains to professional techniques employed by individuals, not websites.

Anyway, onto the technical!

The Technical part of it

Anyone who does serious web development knows that this specific SEO is a byproduct of what they do. Semantic markup and quality construction of a page is the stuff crawlers love. Asking a web developer if he does SEO is like asking a carpenter if he drives nails. It’s like asking a barber if he trims around the ears. “Well, that’s part of a haircut, isn’t it?”

SEO (in this sense, not the runaway-train phrase of today) has to remain in the technical realm, and there’s a pretty simple reason why: There’s about a million ways to build a website. Even if we narrowed it down to a dozen major frameworks/languages, you’d still be hard pressed to find a single guy that knew everything about all of them.

And yet, SEO gurus consistently claim to be able to optimize any site, whether it’s a Django site, a custom PHP job, a Joomla site, or a site coded in a Swahili version of Perl.

To me, that’s a pretty amazing claim. I know competent programmers who struggle for months and years to become good with one framework. To me, that claim can only be bullshit. Leave the technical stuff to the guys who know what Javascript is.

And, yes, of course there are very simple things you can do to improve your website’s ranking, if your website is in a bad enough condition. But getting your hair trimmed around the ears doesn’t qualify as a haircut. And you shouldn’t be paying full haircut prices for it.

The non-technical part of it

Websites have stuff inside the tags, too. I get that. Content is the big driver of the web, and it’s a big driver of a website.

If you’re consulting on content strategy or rewriting the content of a website to better suit your market’s searches, then fine. But let’s call that Search Engine Marketing. Because that’s what you’re doing, if you do that. There’s nothing wrong with SEM because these techniques (among many others in SEM) are clear, well-documented and easy to explain.

For a lot of folks, this could boil down to semantics. If you just thought, “Okay, great, he’s not talking about me,” then you might just be right. If you’re one of those folks, go to your various web presences and delete all references to SEO.

Do it because, right now, you’re never been a part of a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. As Obi-Wan said, you must be cautious.

SEO doesn’t have the openness or easy explanations. SEO is a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, etched in another language on stone tablets pulled from the side of a mountain. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

Building a backlink empire

The final part of “SEO” is the stuff done off-site. Ever since a startup called Google decided to make backlinks a leading factor in search results, this has been a pretty big deal. I’ve heard it described by SEO pros a being between 40% and 80% of the job.

There’s two ways to build your backlink empire: whitehat and blackhat.

Whitehat is the good stuff. It’s getting coverage on blogs or other online publications. It’s getting people to link to your site in their tweets. It’s building a social media presence on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.

It’s, well, it’s public relations. More and more, this is (and has been for a while now) a function of PR. There are other whitehat strategies like building partnerships (linkswapping sounds so 90s, but you might know it by this name), but I see those as in the realm of PR too.

I’ve asked about other backlink strategies that fall specifically to an SEO guy and outside the PR realm. That’s when I collected most of the insults I listed above. There are some easy answers too, such as paid listings (search advertising) but again, I see that as falling to SEM. Buying a search ad isn’t optimizing.

Whitehat’s evil twin brother is blackhat. Blackhat practices are unfair to everybody involved except the person doing them. They’re basically a bag of (admittedly, often very clever) tricks that can artificially boost a site’s rankings.

The problem here for “SEO” is that the bag of tricks is running out. Year after year, new tricks are squashed by Google and the other search engines. What’s left? Well, I have no idea. Like I said, I’m completely happy to confess ignorance here.

But don’t ask me, ask an SEO guru which specific techniques he uses to build backlinks. You’ll be met with silence. Or you’ll be called a liar and a scammer, like I was.

Why? Well, in my mind, there’s three possibilities:

It’s a secret sauce: The SEO guru has a bag of tricks that are all above-the-belt, honest techniques that he can use to supercharge your web presence. He just doesn’t want to tell anyone because, hey, it’s a trade secret. This is the pick for folks who still believe in the tooth fairy.

It’s blackhat: The SEO guru makes a bunch of fake blogs that link to a product. Or he knows a hack that will be fixed by Google six months from now, potentially getting a client site banned in the process. Because he uses blackhat techniques, he doesn’t want to talk about it because hey, it kind of makes him look like a jerk.

It’s complete bullshit: All the tricks have run out. SEO is a duct-taped faux-industry running on fumes. All that’s left is to live out the momentum of the glory days and hope that clients keep paying big bucks for a temporary fix that’s best executed by real professionals with real specializations.

I’m leaning towards the bullshit option. SEO has surrounded itself with a shroud of mystery that keeps people from asking questions. Part of what allowed this is the very nature of search: It’s complicated. Google says they use over 200 factors in weighing sites. And it changes literally every day, every hour and most recently every minute.

It’s too easy to label yourself with SEO. And I’m just not buying it. SEO is still a band-aid on the bleeding wound of bad web development.

Next time someone tells you they do “search engine optimization,” ask them which search engine they work at.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to point to the clearly tagged disclosure that’s included with your article? That’s the disclosure tag. And it’s sorely needed in HTML5.

The strengths of semantic disclosure

Portability

One current convention of disclosure is the site-wide disclosure policy. Like a privacy policy, it’s linked in its own section, usually in the footer or navigation.

The major drawback of such a policy is aggregation. An article that’s torn from its home site and posted in different places won’t have that same footer or navigation, opening the author up to potential disclosure violations.

Like the header or time HTML5 tags, the disclosure tag would travel with the blog post, protecting the author regardless of where it was posted.

Separation

Disclosures exist in a limbo state. Sometimes they’re part of the article, and sometimes they aren’t. Authors will often awkwardly paste them in at the beginning or end of their article, or as mentioned above, depend on a site-wide umbrella disclosure. The disclosure tag would keep the disclosure text separate from the post’s text, while still keeping it within the article tag.

Style

As a separate element, disclosure would place an emphasis on developing a style for displaying the disclosure text, something that’s often overlooked now. More often than not, authors aren’t the ones designing their sites; a default disclosure style saves them from the plight of having to style their own (or worse, finding a disclosure plug-in of some kind).

How it would work

The article element

Like header and time mentioned above, disclosure would be a child of the article element. It would be optional; not all articles need disclosures.

In-line disclosure

The HTML5 working draft already includes an example of in-line disclosure under the small tag description. Functionality like this (disclosure: I’m a co-worker of John McExample) wouldn’t be handled by disclosure.  Rather, general article disclosures or site-wide disclosures would be suitable. Some examples:

<disclosure>The author received a promotional copy of the book Strike Up the Web before writing this review.</disclosure>

<disclosure>The author is a former employee of Match Strike.</disclosure>

<disclosure>The author was paid by SuperConglomerate International to write this post.</disclosure>

Just as articles can sometimes have multiple authors, an article may need more than one disclosure.

Linking a disclosure

Disclosures could be linked within the disclosure tag. This maintains the flexibility of having a site-wide disclosure, without exposing the author to potential liabilities through aggregation. Here’s an example:

<disclosure>See <a href="http://matchstrike.net/d.html">Match Strike's Disclosure Policy</a></disclosure>

Authors could link to external disclosures (from disclosure services, open-source disclosure statements, etc.) in a similar manner.

The growing importance of disclosure

Disclosure isn’t going to be less important by the time HTML5 is finalized. By then, the need will be absolutely clear, especially if the FTC start regularly taking action against offenders. We need disclosure as a tag now, not as a “Wouldn’t that have been nice?” spec in HTML6.