There is a lot of talk now a days in terms of Search Engine Optimization. It is an industry that more or less invented itself. A famous quote comes to mind, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. However, in this case is really a need for Search Engine Optimizers?
Paul Boag of the Boagworld.com Podcast has discussed this before and expressed his opinion that it is an overly focused on field. He is against all the tricks and sneaks that many people employee used to try and artificially boost your site into higher rankings. He says that good Accessible code is really the best method and the rest will come with good content.
While I see his point, and it is valid, I believe there are instances where search engine optimization is necessary. While trying to trick the search engines into thinking that your site is more valuable than it is, will only work in a temporary situation, eventually the search engines will catch on and the ranking will drop.
However, there are situations where a new website has quality content, but by itself users will be unable to find it due to poor search engine rankings. In these situations it can benefit the users and website owners alike, to be able to find the quality content website with out having to follow other links and see the URL on a marketing document.
E-Commerce sites, where there are thousands of competitors that sell the same product. While some sites might have better prices or have better practices, the user benefits by being able to sort through as many relevant results as possible. By search engine optimizing, a relevant site can be found instead of being lost among the last 10 pages of random garbage that many search engines tend to turn up.
