SEOs worldwide were shocked by the Search Engine Strategies Chicago Keynote of earlier today given by Jason Calacanis, who said “SEO is BS, if you generate a web page with good content Google will rank the page properly.”

Despite the fact that many SEOs did get offended, I’m beginning to wonder if Calacanis had other intentions by making that statement. Really, the content of his speech was worth “linking to” and discussing. His name is getting out there. He essentially is “attacking link attention with controversy” (thanks, Rand) and giving himself a lot of publicity as a result. I think Graywolf is really proving the point.

If you have “good content” or something that’s worth talking about, people will refer to you. People will talk about you. That’s how you build reputation. On the Internet, that may very well be called SEO. And I bet that Calacanis cleverly orchestrated his speech with this exact intention.

I wonder how many searches in Google/blogsearch will yield an exact result for Calacanis’s quote. I bet there are quite a few thus far.

SEO is a very insular field. My impression from my readings of SEO blogs is that many SEOs themselves are so involved in search engine optimization that sometimes they forget that there’s a whole wide world of individuals who still don’t know about it and why it is necessary.

A few months ago, I didn’t know what SEO was either. The term was used in front of me, and I’ll admit (with a little blush :oops:) that I didn’t know what in the world SEO meant and shrugged it off whenever it was mentioned rather than asking. I never wanted to find out what it was because I didn’t want to risk looking stupid among people to whom SEO is a daily routine.

I come from a mixed technology background: I started off dabbling in programming and web development, though I realized I fared better with more of hardware, networking, and system administration work. I began my career in SEO by actually doing system administration at a web design, SEO, and hosting firm. And I still didn’t know what SEO was when I joined up with the team.

So much for those fun and games. Zoo.com, which was lauded as a safe online haven for kids, may not be completely what it seems. Child-friendly? Maybe, though it depends on your sources. Is it completely effective? Doubtful.

Effort has been made in the past to create a kid-friendly search engine, and we thought this one was it. We were excited and we cheered. But ResearchBuzz ran into several shortcomings and questioned the vitality of this system as a whole.

ResearchBuzz finds two issues, primarily that it’s still providing results for terms like “ritalin prescription” (spam, anyone?) and that it is being intentionally devious with its “sponsored” listings scattered throughout regular search results. This issue is a big concern on a search engine intended for children between the ages of 8 and 13, and I completely agree.

The success of this model will require a lot of feedback from individuals if it is to thrive. For one, filtering out over 50,000 phrases might not be enough. Only certain sites should be considered for the engine, because even with its shortcomings and admittance to the system’s imperfections, InfoSpace is almost saying that it endorses the sites that appear in the search engine results.

Some of the best things in life are free. I am thankful to those who have shared wonderful tools with me and I would like to share them with others too.

A few of these are new tools. Some are old and well-known. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

SEO Tools

• SEO for Firefox: An excellent Firefox addon that provides users market data from Google and Yahoo search results, including PR, age of domain, links from external pages (and types), type of domain, Technorati data, Alexa ranking, DMOZ listing, number of cached pages, Bloglines subscriptions, Yahoo directory listing, and whois information.
• Page Strength SEO Tool: This SEOmoz offering calculates the value and visibility of your page and incorporates links pointing to the URL/domain, Google search results position, age of domain, links from .edu and .gov sites, Alexa rank, number of results in Google that include the domain, internal link percentage, Technorati links, del.icio.us links, DMOZ listing, Wikipedia reference, and Google PR.

I find it ironic (and totally unplanned) that the blog topic I wrote on usability on at work today is featured in a similar light from the New York Times in today’s article about web site usability. They must have attended the conferences yesterday for World Usability Day. (For the record, that work blog had been a work in progress since yesterday, before I knew about World Usability Day as well.)

I’ll summarize my blog points on web usability guidelines:

1. Make the goal of your website (a product sale, for example) stand out at you on the landing page.
2. Understand the emotions of someone interested in your website and know that you are not your audience.
3. Include persuasive content. Use power words.
4. Design something memorable — in a good and catchy way.
5. Don’t add unnecessary bells and whistles that detract from your offerings.

The New York Times article reiterated important guidelines that I also touch upon, such as approachability (contact information being easily found), eliminating unnecessary design elements, and even mentions a bit of SEO basics (using quotes from Matt Cutts) as well.