I like to think that I’ve received a couple of compliments during my career as an SEO (just one or two in nearly 5 years – not bad huh?!)… There’s probably also been an instance or two of a criticism or an insult, but hey, let’s just concentrate on the positives, yeah? 😉
Out of those compliments, the best one I ever received regarding my SEO skills wasn’t from a manager, a fellow team member, an industry peer or a client. It was from a developer.
Why’s that such a big deal? Because it’s fairly common knowledge that a lot of developers out there hate SEOs. You only need to spend 5 minutes looking at the comments on Hacker News submissions related to SEO to see how much our industry is despised by what seems like the majority of the web/software development community. Here are two examples of threads and a few choice excerpts, because clearly I’m a sadist…
- “SEO is basically gaming search engines instead of contributing anything of value. It’s not a respectable business.”
- “SEO is a nasty little cottage industry.”
- “[SEOs] are polluting the web and degrading the experience for millions of users.”
- “SEO is more a plague then it is a real profession.”
- And my personal favourite: “SEO is a cargo cult with no benefits to society.”
Blood boiling yet? Thought so. A lot of sweeping statements there – and yet if I shouted “web/software developers are {rude|hugely ignorant|whiny crybabies}” in return, I’m sure there’d be hell to pay (besides, it wouldn’t be true anyway)…
But I digress… The purpose of this article isn’t to further deteriorate SEO-developer relations – it’s actually to extend an olive branch.