Your assertion that SEO's are unequivocally a scummy bunch is wrong and seems pretty irrational to me. A lot of SEO is simply making sure you include good descriptions for items, include keywords, have a properly marked up site so that you are not unfairly penalized, when you have a legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words. The fact that these SEO companies also did affiliate marketing (not spamming links on message boards and people's websites!), used to be considered pretty white hat and necessary to get any sort of ranking above page 39 or something.
Advertising via adwords and things like that is a very expensive activity, with no guarantee of increasing legitimate traffic and interested customers. Prices have increased greatly over time in most categories, and though larger businesses might have the margins where losing a few tens or hundreds of thousands here and there on ineffective advertising might not be a problem, but it disproportionately is for smaller businesses.
The biggest problem is really that Google has a pretty effective monopoly on search, and can extort whatever prices they want for advertising, and can also make widespread secret changes that pretty much affect what sites are allowed to show up on the internet and which are not.
> A lot of SEO is simply making sure you include good descriptions for items, include keywords, have a properly marked up site so that you are not unfairly penalized, when you have a legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words.
For the most part we are in agreement here (except for the 'legitimate reason to show up in results for certain search words', if there are 100 companies in a certain field then only 10 of them will show up on page 1, regardless of any reasons to show up).
> The biggest problem is really that Google has a pretty effective monopoly on search, and can extort whatever prices they want for advertising, and can also make widespread secret changes that pretty much affect what sites are allowed to show up on the internet and which are not.
This we also are very strongly in agreement on. Monoculture is bad. Monopolies are bad. And no, bing, ddg and so on do not count.
Advertising via adwords and things like that is a very expensive activity, with no guarantee of increasing legitimate traffic and interested customers. Prices have increased greatly over time in most categories, and though larger businesses might have the margins where losing a few tens or hundreds of thousands here and there on ineffective advertising might not be a problem, but it disproportionately is for smaller businesses.
The biggest problem is really that Google has a pretty effective monopoly on search, and can extort whatever prices they want for advertising, and can also make widespread secret changes that pretty much affect what sites are allowed to show up on the internet and which are not.