The SEO industry has bought into the same myth that strikes all content industries – that is, that there’s some repeatable formula guaranteed to produce best sellers. All we have to do is find that formula and set up an assembly line to push out best sellers. Hence, The Land Before Time XII: The Great Day of the Flyers. If the first 11 were good, the 12th must be fabulous!

But the simple truth is that there’s no formula. It’s the unique movies that are the blockbusters, not the cookie-cutter movies. And yet every time there’s a bestseller, there are dozens or hundreds of copy-cats that try to mimic that success. Witness the Young Adult Fiction section of your local bookstore. This year, it’s all vampire books. Two years ago, it was all magician books.

So why does the SEO industry get away with their high rates and ludicrous promises? Well, obviously because Computers Are Hard, and we are the Experts to Help You Succeed. And since you are ignorant, we can convince you that anything, no matter how silly, is going to help you achieve world fame and success.

Not only are folks wasting most of the time on the Apache support channels on wrong-headed mod_rewrite questions (“How do I remove ‘index.html’ from all of my URLs to improve my search engine rank?”) but thousands of companies are spending billions of dollars of work time on optimizations that won’t actually do anything useful.

What’s the secret? Well, it’s really quite simple. The secret is, and always has been, to have something that people want, and present it in an attractive way. Of the two things, the first is far and away the most important. If you have a website that has a product everyone wants, your presentation is secondary. If you have content that everyone is clamoring for, and, as importantly, tell all their friends about, it’s not terribly important that it doesn’t look perfect.

Witness Craig’s List, an incredibly ugly website which is one of the great Internet successes. Note that it has what “SEO experts” call ugly URLs. Interestingly, so does Google, by which we presume to measure all of our success.

A very alarming trend that I’ve observed in the last year or so is the number of folks saying things like “Yes, I know it doesn’t accomplish anything, but my boss says I have to.” This highlights two problems. One, management refusing to listen to the folks who know something, and throwing away millions of dollars of their company budget. Two, technology experts who can’t, or won’t, stand up for what they know to be true, to the benefit of their company and investors.

Folks need to wake up and use reality as their measuring stick, not some snake-oil SEO salesman telling them that this technique, or that one, is guaranteed to make your website a best-seller. It’s nonsense, and they know it, and view you as an easy mark. Don’t get taken in.

I just finished reading Founding Brothers, by Joseph J Ellis. It’s history as I like to read it – that is, the personal stories of the people at the center of the events. Having never attended an American high school, I never learned about the history of the early United States, and so what I know comes from books like this one and John Adams.

Founding Brothers was masterful and easy to read, giving me insight into events that were inexplicable to me before – in particular the Hamilton/Burr affair, which never made any sense to me.

Highly recommended.

Skater

Here’s the transcript of Isaiah’s story that a few of you asked for.

Why the Bald Eagle is Bald

By Isaiah

Once there was Sky God. He created the animals, but made Miglo the first eagle (soon the bald eagle) to rule the mountains, and made is head gold. Miglo was very proud of his gold head. He would show off to all of the animals. Bear went to the Sky God. He told him that Miglo was showing off. Sky God said “Bear, you say that Miglo, the eagle, is showing off. Is it so.” “Yes,” said Bear. “Hmm,” said Sky God. That night Sky God burned eagle’s head till it was bald. In the morning, eagle went to a stream and screamed because he was bald. And to this day, Miglo and his children’s children are all bald.

I’m missing a lot of the story. Rick Hendrick, who is a NASCAR race driver and team owner, has apparently given generously to assist in evacuations and rescue operations in Haiti. Part of that was that he flew my sister and her kids home last night. They arrived just after midnight, and his organization paid for the whole thing, and gave to the relief effort at Quisqueya.

I might suddenly become a NASCAR fan. Go Jeff Gordon!

UPDATE

So, apparently the story is even more complicated than that. Mr. Hendrick, who also loaned his plane and flight crew to Katrina relief efforts, is flying people out of Haiti as fast as he can with his plane. The other flights – the rest of the way up here – were taken care of by other generous people.

The generosity that’s being shown this week is amazing. I’m sure that recriminations for mismanagement will come later, but watching folks step up and do what they can, and even more folks step and do what they didn’t know they could, is very encouraging.

Some of you may know that I have family in Haiti. They are unhurt. Tens of thousands of other people, however, are hurt, and many thousands are killed. Perhaps a million people are sleeping on the streets tonight because there are still aftershocks and they are afraid the remaining buildings will fall on them in the night.

My brother-in-law, who is a school headmaster, is now running an orphanage and a hospital – or, rather, the school is being used for these purposes because it is undamaged. The orphanage fell down, and all the kids were moved to the school. The hospitals are completely overwhelmed.

If you’re looking for some place to give a few dollars in the hopes that they will be well-used, I would encourage you to read what is being done at that school, take a look at the school website, and consider giving via the paypal link at the bottom.

What has been accomplished in the last few days has been done by folks who have stepped up and done what they saw that needed to be done. Watching the news last night, I watched US Army folks talking about how they were doing nothing because they were waiting for someone else to make a decision. What happened to “The Buck Stops Here.” It was infuriating and frustrating to watch hundreds of tons of food and water just sitting there because everyone was waiting for someone else.

Three years ago, during the election, a mob stormed the Hotel Montana, and, overcome by the beauty they found there, stayed to play. My sister wrote this:

Hotel Montana, by Ruth Hersey

…

And when we got in
You would hardly believe how beautiful it was.
There was a pool
Like the ocean but clean,
Blue like a huge Culligan bottle
How many buckets were carried on how many heads to fill that pool?
Maybe the angels did it.
And then I jumped in
And the water frothed with joy as we splashed it on each other
And some people reclined on heavenly deck chairs
And some explored the many mansions.

…

Today, the Hotel Montana is in ruins, as a result of yesterday’s earthquake.

Ruth was, I think, going to re-post the entire poem this week. I retrieved it from backups of an old website she posted it on several years ago, since that was her only copy of it. But this week she’s living in a soccer field, and doesn’t have electricity or internet, so it may be a while before you get to read the whole thing.