PC Mag has again run an article trying to Trash Talk SEO. The basis of it seems absurd. This is the sub-heading:

Try and find the best cell phone deal on the Internet using a search engine. Every hit is some commercial site trying to sell you something.

Maybe it is just me, but if I was looking to buy a mobile phone, I guess I would be pretty interested in sites trying to sell it to me.

Personally I think the article is just a bit of 'link bait' . Trying to encourage interest by being controversial and hopefully getting inbound links and lots of comments for PC Mag. Seeing as online marketers generally provide a lot of online content through blogs, forums and comments, it seems a pretty good way of getting interest.

But I am not going to add to it, so no links here.

However, there might be a few people out there who take that bit of nonsensical ranting seriously, and if that is you, then please read on...

The principle of SEO is to make your site rank well in a search engine. If you sell 'widgets in Melbourne', then you will want to optimise your site to rank highly for 'widgets  in Melbourne'. If people are searching for widgets in Melbourne and find your site - well that is a good match, wouldn't you say? This is what they were looking for, and they can check out your site and buy or not.

SEO helps businesses improve their profile online and expose themselves to relevant  customers. This doesn't mean that there are no 'spammy' practitioners out there. Of course there are. Just like there are dodgy lawyers, stock brokers, sales people, insurance companies, builders... there are dodgy people in every industry. Just because there are ambulance chasers out there doesn't mean there aren't lawyers who genuinely help people and businesses (did I just shoot myself in the foot?).

So if you have a website, and you want people to visit it, implement some SEO measures. You're not a bad person for doing it, you're just living in the 21st Century.