The SEO you’ve heard about and moaned about is probably not the same SEO I’ve heard about. A recent forum thread on Boagworld has showed me one thing: people misunderstand “SEO”. They’re taking all of the bad and spammy practices and labelling ALL search engine optimisation professionals with it.

Is it just me, or is that the equivalent of saying front-end developers are shit because they code using tables… or worse, Irish people are always drunk? Neither of those things are true, and it’s also not true that good SEO is bullshit or, more importantly, bad for the user.

You’ve probably heard about bad SEO. That’s because you can _see_ bad SEO. It’s the footer crammed with “Web design birmingham, web design london, web design moon”, it’s the spammy title tag, poor content. I could go on. THAT IS NOT WHAT SEO IS ANY MORE.

The reason you’re not moaning about good SEO is because there’s nothing to moan about. Good SEO goes hand-in-hand with the users’ experience on a website. Relevant title tags, headings, images, content and pages. The user experience is a big part of what Google notices now. Whether a page is accessible, whether the content is relevant.

The _only_ thing that SEOs do that could be conceived as sneaky is get links back to the website. But guess what? That doesn’t affect the way the website works, so it doesn’t matter.