--- title: "SEO is bullshit" kind: article slug: seo-is-bullshit created_at: 2012-05-24 tags: - Opinion - seo - rant --- I get quite a lot of "oh we can SEO optimize your site for you" emails lately. I don't know why, but **SEO is bullshit**. Really. SEO is one of those _areas of expertise_ that are total rubbish. ## Common SEO advice The most common advise regarding SEO includes: * Getting links to your site * Add tons of keywords so the Google Crawler knows what you're talking about * Add META data, lots of it * Structure your page in some way for crawlers to understand better * Add an XML sitemap There might be some merit in this, but you are optimizing your site for a _crawler_, a _computer program_ that interprets your site. Are crawlers your primary audience? If so, you have a sad site. _SEO Hacking_ is another common term I find in emails. SEO hacking tries to trick search engines to list your site higher for certain keywords. I won't go into the details, but basically you try to cheat a search engine's indexing rules. Some shady SEO companies even offer you a guarantee that you'll be the number 1 listen for certain keywords. Really? But how valuable is that? The problem with doing a lot of SEO hacks on your site is this: search engines and crawlers are continuiously updated to prevent hacking. Although this is not disclosed by Google, there are rumours that if you do actually use 'SEO hacks', you're site will be ranked lower, instead of higher. ## The best SEO advice you can get So, what can you do to make people find your site? Simple: **Write. Good. Content.** Use headers like `