Can I start again begging for a review of our pilot project site (see above)? :)

Ultimately this may be a matter of philosophy and naming. What you’re describing sounds to me like a sophisticated and useful course in web design. But SEO as a business has not traditionally been practiced in that way — although you’ll find some people who claim to be “White Hat SEOs”, the profusion of black hat SEO practices on the web — and the great extent to which Google’s database has actually been poisoned — argues that ethical SEO is, at least, too rare. If you’re teaching your students the ethics to go along with the tools, my hat is off to you.

If you can believe, that SEO and webmarketing can have acceptable methods and goals, librarian students are really prepared for these tasks. At least at the university, to be a librarian doesn’t only mean borrowing books, rather organizing information (books, document, databases), classification, research, and providing information. These skills are really necessary to build up an information rich, useful, comfortable, well structured, well written website. White hat SEO means that. Black hat SEO is the abusing of search engines, but of course these are banned by the engines, and the students aren’t encouraged to use these methods. We follow Google’s guideline: don’t be cruel.

And I found a good, pretty old example, how can the lack of SEO knowledge poison an index. Just try a google search for click here. The first results are Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash and QuickTime. These webpages have nothing to do with click here, they really don’t contain these keywords. So a surfer who search for click here will receive unusable results on the first result page. This happens, because any webmaster who publish any .pdf or flash, feels mandatory to provide a link to download the necessary reader or player. And they write click here into the anchor text. This is really poisoning the index. Of course, there is a simple solution, remove the click here from the anchor, just write download Adobe Reader/ADobe Flash/QuickTime in it (it’s SEO). But some webmasters probably have the opinion, that they visitors aren’t experienced enough to click on an underlined, call to action link, and for these visitors they want to use the click here text too (it’s webmarketing). This is a conflict, which can be solved of course: create an image with the text click here to download…, use it in the anchor, and add an alt attribute (which is mandatory for strict XHTML) with the text without click here. This solution will satify both search engines (they can’t read the images, but read the alt attribute of them) and visitors (they can read the text on the image). This way SEO and webmarketing knowledge ensured a really useful, easy to index webpage.

I think, it’s worth to distinguish the using and abusing of any knowledge, as well as SEO and webmarketing. I hope, I could explain you the situation.

For us SEO doesn’t mean the poisoning of search engines. We try to know the search engines, how they find the sites, how they build up the index, and how they rank the sites. And based on this knowledge, we try to ensure, that our sites will be well structured, well coded, information rich, and connected to the other public stuff of the affected community. You can imagine it, as a well illustrated explanation of Google Webmaster Guidelines with a scientific background. And I’m sure Google doesn’t publish anything to degree the quality of its service. So search engine optimisation means for as a brief introduction, how to build up a good website, first of all an appropriate website for search engines and text browsers. Its focus is on the information and structure, not on the design. To sum up, we try to satisfy the search engines, not cheat them – as a good lover.

Webmarketing has the similar goals: build up a good website. But it’s focused on the visitor’s experience. Of course it is the same, but extended with design. Maybe I can tell you that SEO is HTML, webmarketing is HTML+CSS. And additionally the connection with the community, not for good rankings, but to reach the audience, to share the information. A similar conclusion, as for SEO: we try to satisfy our visitors, not cheat them.

I think, you ban the tools, but the verdict sometimes depends on the goals.

And finally about the lost email: maybe your spam filter has caught it, I won’t resend. If you want to read it, you can look for it in your recycle bin.

Beyond that, I’ll note that it strikes me as both ironic and actively bizarre that you’re attempting to teach SEO and web marketing to library students. Perhaps librarians have a different function in Hungary than they do here, but marketing is not usually a librarian function here.

And teaching SEO to librarians is like teaching fornication to a priest. Librarians — at least in the USA — are taught to improve access to information, with a strong emphasis on creation and improvement of information databases. SEO is fundamentally antithetical to this; at its heart, SEO is about poisoning search databases and confusing their algorithms to your own benefit. See:

Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists

There’s a shallow “SEO lite” aspect of the profession that’s about good web design, but that stuff is taught in any decent web design class; and for the most part, it’s brutally obvious “make sure your meta information is present and useful” stuff. Teaching librarians to feed poison to Google is just about the wildest strangest idea I’ve heard in weeks.

I am aware that there is a bit of a language barrier here, so possibly I’m misunderstanding part of this.

Thank you for your detailed explanation about bad marketing/SEO emails. I’m a lecturer at a Hungarian University, and I teach (and learn:)) SEO and webmarketing to librarian students. A single semester is really short for a normal project, that’s why we’ve chosen a very hot topic, sexuality of course, and we hope it will be successful enough to survive, and to be maintained for a longer period of time. And this is the reason, why I’m really happy, I can show the students an original, real life example how to write a bad email.

I think, my above mentioned email was error-free from this point of view, but I would be really thankful, if you could tell us, what was wrong. And of course every critics on [link removed] is welcomed, we’d like to learn.

Finally I totally agree with you. Such an email has to contain a few relevant sentences of the receiver’s site, a short and relevant introduction, and in case of link exchange an existing link to the receiver’s site from the sender’s site. And additionally it should be correct English, which is our weak point. (But maybe this bad example will show my students, that they have a good chance to get a job, because there are many worse employee in the business.)

Thank you in advance, and please, remove the URLs from my comment, if them hurt your principles.