Who needs SEO?

I often wonder about search engine optimization (SEO). Does it really deserve its own little separate subspace of the IT industry? First, I acknowledge that almost all internet surfing/browsing/searching/whatever starts with an internet search. Therefore, it is important for all kinds of websites to show up early in internet searches and the concept of SEO is thus vindicated.

But why do so many people “specialize” in SEO? How can a company survive doing only SEO? How did SEO become an entire industry? The first two questions are easily answered: People are willing to pay for it. As to how it got to that point, the third question remains unanswered to me.

I have tried to search online to figure out what is so hard about SEO. In some forums, like in this webmasterworld forum post, some people say that anyone can perform SEO while others say that SEO is definitely worth the money. Other places, I only find vague descriptions about why SEO is not easy, e.g. in a search engine optimization journal blog post.

The biggest problem with SEO is, in my opinion, all the many “SEO experts” that have come out of the blue and advertise themselves with fancy words like return-of-investment and number one rankings on all search engines. Google even warns about this in an excellent support answer about SEO. Of course there are people that have certain skills and might even be worth hiring for improving online business. But I think that SEO also has so much hype these days that it is difficult to know exactly what you get.

Maybe I am just blissfully ignorant to the wonders of SEO. Maybe that is why this blog has so few readers. But at least I am (currently) ranked fourth on Google when searching for “thought flow“. Whether that is due to the 15 minutes I spend on SEO for this site or the fact that thought flow is not a common search term, I do not know. But I did not pay $1000 for it.

Added since original post:
The world’s shortest guide to SEO