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SEO is deffinately not a waste. It could be the difference in 50 views a day & 1000 views a day.

Although I disagree with AMEX stating that SEO isn't valuable, from personal experience I would guess that 80-90% of the SEO companies are useless or only good for a quick boost in traffic (yes, with danger of being blacklisted).

Working as a "web administrator" for a large company I had several of these companies contact me and make outrageous claims. I truly felt that I had better experiences with used car salesmen.

Yes, SEO is valuable and there are companies that do it well, but it probably is more useful for companies to focus on good content delivery before dumping 10s of thousands of dollars into the SEO bucket.

Yet another self-appointed expert/corporate busybody - probably a whole committee of corporate busybodies - doesn't know the difference between SEO and SEO spam.

Definitely a committee.  The stupidity of one person wouldn't have sufficed.

(The snipping noise you hear involves a scissors and my American Express card.)

Sam

I too am an SEO specialist and am going to be certified by Yahoo and Google as such.  I always tell my clients "don't take my word for it" and provide them will screen shots of their websites with page 1 and 2 rankings for their particular keywords and key phrases.  Pay per click has its use but its usually the haves vs. the have nots; so that natural search positioning is not only useful be levels the playing field.  Perhaps I will optimize for "American Express", "AMEX" and "credit card fraud" and achieve page 1 rankings for that without using any black hat techniques.  I wonder what AMEX's clients will feel when "AMEX credit card fraud" is attached to their name on page 1 of this returned search result.

This is a very interesting article and I believe the skewed views comes from people still having the wrong idea of what SEO truly is and what "successful" SEO should accomplish.

I am the SEM manager here at my company and recently I've stressed to our business owners that true SEO is not all about getting 1st position in SERPs or even getting traffic. True SEO will can get you that 1st, 2nd position but to me successful SEO will get you "quality" traffic and conversions.

SEO=relevant content, which in turn =qualty traffic + conversions. This is why SEO is important. Internet users that find your content irrelevant or lacking will leave and never return. When internet users search Google, do they not read the blue (with bolded keywords) titles, the descriptions? Aren't title tags and descriptions part of SEO? Yes.

SEO is about making you content (title, description, text on pages) highly relevant. That is the start of truly successful SEO. From there, a link building campaign can start but thats a whole other topic.

That is the most conservatief statement ever regarding SEO.

But because hounest seo will not garantuee specific search engine results, a lot of people think it's just a matter of believing and not science.

Yeah, it's easy to say SEO is a waste when you're already a massive credit card firm. There's a point where if your product or website is unique/successful enough, the role of SEO will diminish (maddox is a prime example).

For smaller businesses and website developers SEO is necessary to compete, or they'll get crushed by other established companies, brands and pages.

These comments from Amex were obviously written by someone who has a superficial understanding of SEO and probably of the Internet in general, and so should be taken as such. I don't pretend to be an expert on credit or credit cards, and I would certainly hesitate to give anyone else advice in that area; so perhaps Amex should just stick to what it knows best.

Like most SEO professionals, we have a base of very satisfied customers who know better, and who have seen the fruits of our labors with their own eyes.

Moreover, for the true SEO professional, repeat business and referrals from existing customers will carry far more weight than any unsolicited, ill-conceived, and lame-brained, one or two sentence, "advisory" in some obsure .pdf that most of their customers probably don't even bother to read anyhow.

Of course, there are unscrupulous people out there who are doing SEO while promising more than they could ever deliver and delivering little or nothing. Those are probably the people Amex had in mind. Perhaps what Amex should have done is what we do on our website; provide guidelines for distinguishing the true SEO professional from the self-appointed, un-trained, and inexperienced hack who just wants to get paid while doing as little work as possible.

From what I understand, the Amex OPEN program has not been particularly successful anyhow, so personally, I don't plan on worrying about it.

clueless and contradictory corporate view. Its that kind of ignorance that really gives SEO a bad name. Uninformed people making accusations about entire industres, ridiculous.

I've read the various posts and would like to share my experience as a small business owner who worked with a SEO firm for almost a full year.

I , like others did my due diligence by researching the firm and checking references with other business owners before signing up.  I spent thousands of dollars for:

• An "artificial change in ranking"  (The firm as it turns out was using link farms and other questionable tactics to get my pages ranked higher in the search engines).
• Fancy reports slanted to show how many visitors were brought to might site.  Thier numbers by the way were much higher than the stats provided by my own web hosting site.
• Manipulating what is real with what is a sham to try to  keep me on board with the firm month after month:  "It takes months to get ranked in search engines, so you need to be patient"  This statement is absolutely true but it is the hook that keeps trusting business owners with them shelling out the $$ for months longer than they should.

There may be reputable SEO firms out there, but given my experience, I'll never take the chance to find out because I was burned so badly the first time.

I organize one of those Meetup groups that OPEN sponsors. They have made hard copy booklets of the same info available to my group although, I have personally only read sections of it, not the entire booklet. A number of the other Meetup organizers they support are in the business of SEO/SEM.

The booklet was designed for use by business owners, not computer geeks like the people reading reading this article and threaded comments. If THAT public finds value within the pages, it has fulfilled its purpose. Anyone in business has to make decisions and, the average person in business won't be building their own web site.

If the person hired to build that web site knows what they're doing, that business person won't be lead astray. And, I for one, wouldn't trust many of the commenters on this board to do a thing for me! Some have made reasoned comments but, the ranting is just plain... well, you have exposed yourself as not worthy of the title of professional.

The comment or notion that SEO is a waste is just a downright foolish statement.

Although we haven't paid for SEO or SEM, taking the time to do it was about the best investment that our company (& my fingers) made to our website, www.parpools.com .  With good SEO (praise God) we rank in the top 5 of organic searches for the bulk of keywords.  That has translated to increased site visits & finally to increased revenues.

For the small business person who is operating & "webmastering" their own site, my advice to them would be to make sure you read & participate in forums & groups such as this one.  There's a tremendous amount of good, FREE info that will only help.

Paid SEM is OK.  Organic is GREAT!

American Express is a horrible credit card company. If for any reason you can’t pay the balance in full you are screwed. This statement from AMEX American Express makes me want to buy a domain and exploit everything bad about American Express. I’ll make the site rank on the first page of google, yahoo, and MSN. Does American Express issue statements about other forms of advertising as well. I’ve been working in Marketing and advertising for many years and now work for an SEO firm. My clients generate more leads and calls from SEO than any other form of advertising. I sold radio and can honestly say that millions of business have been burned on radio campaigns. I don’t see American Express issuing statements like this about radio advertising. They know that CBS Radio, Clear Channel and the other broadcaster companies will raise the ad rates on them and haul them into court for slander, the RAB Radio Advertising Bureau would sue them as well. AS SEO’s we need to get our act together and form an organization that is similar to the RAB. We need to file a class action law suite against American Express as well.

Message to all SEO’s cancel you AMEX American Express merchant account and stop taking American Express as a payment option. I’m canceling my American Express card today and calling AMEX as well. I think the SEO community needs to fight American Express. Call the American Express numbers today and cancel your account and stop taking American Express.

All SEO’s need to call this number and complain to American Express tell AMEX how we feel.

Customer Service and General Information
1-800-528-4800 / collect Int'l 1-336-393-1111

Customer Service and General Information
1-800-528-4800 / collect Int'l 1-336-393-1111

 I never really paid for S.E.O services. It doesn't seem worth it to me. If I pay someone $50 they can put my link on 100 PR 4 websites within 1 month. I can do that myself.

   Basically if you have a website and work on it by building pages and links, the traffic will come.

http://www.stocks-simplified.com

but ignorant employee of Amex.

I'm shocked that they don't have a better editorial review process at such a large company.  

SEO is of course plagued by some snake oil types, however the general practice and body of knowleged when put into practice can, in fact, produce significant results.  Case in point:

http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/29/sanar-google-skyfacet-tech-cx_ag_0430googhell.html

They're doing a disservice to the companies that read that guide and may actually take it as an absolute truth.

- Sean

That small exert seems really quite amateur to me and the third paragrph is absolute RUBBISH. SEO isn't about tricking the search engines!

Of all the random little tips they could have thrown in there, URL rewriting? How about web standards, semantic mark up, good use of titles and headings, ...?

A large part of SEO isn't on the page; it's in the keyword research, profiling your customer base, creating content they want, and hopefully converting them into a sale. This is not something that most web developers do and is quite a distinct skill in itself.

From my experience as a small site owner, seo is a complete rip off. The people I worked with gave you  no information after cashing your check and just allowed you to sit in silence.  Then they created a phony list  of your first place standings which I could not verify and declared their job finished.

There is an odd kind of chicken and egg relationship between SEO and Traffic, which often creates a cloud of counfusion of the reasons for SEO in the first place. 

The SEO community pushes the idea that ranking a page well is important to creating traffic. In theory at least ranking a page highly would tend to create more traffic, but so what?  Untargeted traffic to as site is pretty much usless if you are selling a product or service.   

On the other side of the coin it can be argued that  a high page rank will follow once there is a marketing / traffic generation program in place which drives more traffic.   That is to say there would be a natural reason for Webmaster with a higher PR sites to link to your site creating the backlinks which are required to get your site ranked higher by Google.  

As some of the other comments have noted getting a high Page Rank is hardly rocket science if you follow some practical guidelines and use a steady common sense approach. 

Page rank might not be at all important for a mini-site / sale page that is intended only for use in a specific marketing program.  It would be a tremendous waste of time to try and rank a page like that.

If you are a major corporation with deep pockets and a vast marketing budget PR might be an all consuming focus of their Internet marketing campaign.  If however you are a small business seeking highly targeted customers in a niche market SEO might indeed be a waste of time.   

Amex is painting all SEO consultants with the "Black Hat SEO" brush.

Sure there have been SEO companies who've goten their clients banned from the search engines using unethical SEO tactics. But I've been practicing ethical SEO for 9 years and have made tons of money for my clients by geting them rankings they could never have gotten on their own. And not one of my clients has ever sufered a penalty in the search engines.

Ask a few of my clients whether their SEO was money well spent. I'm confident in what their responses will be.