Very cool that Paul has started blogging. Welcome! Love to see you at Northern Voice 2007 blogging conference and I'd love to continue the debate in person. Coffee's on me, Paul!

Paul still thinks static websites and link exchanges are valuable and points out a valid use of meta tags (your meta tags show up underneath your google and other search engine listings).

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My SEO article was written for small business owners with simple web sites who want their sites to show up in Google searches. While Tanglao makes some valid rebuttal points, some of his points do not apply to those with static web sites.
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Tanglao says “Link exchanges are a waste of time…” However, CanadianActor Online, like countless other web sites, has move up the search engine ranks primarily based on link exchanges.

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Blogging did not make business sense when I was writing for newspapers and magazines. Nor did it make sense when I was writing primarily for corporate markets. My static web site, supplementing my direct mail and other marketing techniques, drove some clients my way. But mostly it was there to act as an extension of my business card and direct mail – so that people who received my marketing material could read more about me on my web site and see samples of my work. Then they could decide if they wanted to ask for a quote.

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I disagree about link exchanges. Better to blog something compelling and leave a permanent link in a blog comment or email that link to somebody who's relevant rather than spamming people to link to your site.

Yes, a static website is much better than no website. But with modern blogging software like WordPress and content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, Plone it's easy to setup static pages as well as blogs and you then get all the advantages of blogs (ease of editing, RSS which leads to higher search engine rank) and traditional static websites. This means you have a system where anybody can update the content without needing a webmaster or FTP which means the site is more likely to be up to date unlike most static websites.

A timely example of static websites being NOT up to date are most of Vancouver's restaurant websites. You would think that they would have their Christmas hours posted on them. Alas most of them don't because they are static websites set up by "technical" people and designers and the restaurant owners and their staff have no idea how to update them. Very frustrating.

If they had a blog or if they used blog software just for static web pages, the owners could easily update the site's static pages and/or blog with their opening hours.

I'll go further. Technical people and web designers who recommend to clients to use static pages with FTP, Front Page, Dreamweaver, etc. are doing their clients a disservice! It's 2006 not 1999!

Better to use WordPress (even though I work for a Drupal company I'll continue to plug WordPress for blogs and simple static sites; use Drupal if you want a comprehensive web presence including a true community site) and just use its static web pages features and make the blog part invisible) than to use some custom or hand coded static site.

Paul Lima's article in Backbone Magazine entitled HitMe! would be correct if it was 1999. But hey, it's not, it's 2004 and the web has changed.

No disrespect but if you really want to be part of the conversation on the web and have people find out about your website through search engines, here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Make sure your website has clean urls. No funny ampersands, question marks, ".asp", ".php", etc. The rest of search engine optimisation is a waste of time and money. Such as meta tags and search engine registration. Everybody knows that because of spoofing that search engines ignore meta tags. And if your site has an RSS feed and sends pings, the search engines will find it automatically and faster than a normal site even without registration.
2. Link exchanges are a waste of time. If you have cool stuff on your site, people will find it and link it. No need to grovel for a link! Similarly, if you find cool stuff on other people's sites, there's no need to ask permission, just link to it! And having your SEO firm pay people in the Philippines, Poland and elsewhere to ask people to link to your site is irrelevant because links from sites with no content or content that is obviously there to just to increase search engine rankings are a scam that search engines are increasingly ignoring,
3. Create Compelling Content Constantly (TM) on your website about your keywords and your company
4. Have an RSS feed that's updated every time you update your site. [More info]
5. Send a ping every time you update your site. [More info]
6. Most importantly: have a dialogue not a monologue. That means: link to your competitors. Link to your allies. Link to your enemies. Link to bloggers who write about related stuff. Leave comments on other people's blogs when they talk about your company or industry. Use PubSub and Feedster and Google Alerts to find out who's talking about your company and your website and blog about what you find people are saying about your company and your industry. If you don't believe me, then heed the words of Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, who basically said the same thing.

I can hear the gnashing of teeth already. I can understand the appeal of SEO firms. Pay once (or a periodic fee) and let somebody else take care of "that web thing" so "we can concentrate on our core business". And blogs are just diaries aren't they? Wrong!

Again SEO and letting somebody else take care of your website content may have worked in 1999, but that doesn't work in 2004. The web is part of everybody's core business in 2004. Would you trust somebody else to represent you at conferences and industry meetings?

The web in 2004 is a 365 day a year 24 hour industry conference and meeting place (as Doc Searls has stated many times) where more and more customers expect to you to converse actively through your website and the best way to do that is through blogging.

And thanks to tools like Feedster, Bloglines and PubSub and easy to use content management systems like Blogware and Drupal, being part of the conversations is not that difficult and not that time consuming.

Don't believe me? Check back in a couple of years and I bet you'll find that most corporate websites for the companies that matter will have RSS feeds, pings and constantly updated compelling content.

From Hit Me! by Paul Lima - Backbone Magazine - The Strength of E-Business:

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Go to Google. Type “ice painting” in the search box. Hit enter. The number one ranked site at press time was Jet Ice, an ice and specialty paints manufacturer.

Google “Canadian tax law information” and at number one Google returned http://www.taxpage.com, home of Rotfleisch & Samulovitch, a tax and business law firm.

Google “Canadian actors.” Number one result? CanadianActor Online, an education and information resource for aspiring Canuck thespians. Google “search engine placement.” The number one site? Search Engine Optimization Inc.

How does Jet Ice, a Newmarket, Ont. based manufacturer of ice paints, rank number one? How does CanadianActor Online beat out all Canadian actors, Canadian actor fan sites and Canadian actors’ unions and associations? How does Rotfleisch & Samulovitch, a Toronto-based law firm, surpass all other tax law firms? How does SEO, a San Diego, Calif., search-engine optimization company, out-rank other search engine optimization companies?

All four Web sites have been optimized for optimal search engine results.

This means they have:
. defined keywords, the words and phrases search engine visitors use when looking for information,
. embedded keywords in site content, hot links on their sites and in hidden tags that show up in search results,
. asked stakeholders with related Web sites to link to their sites, and
. registered their Web sites with all the major search engines, even paying for listings and ads where marketing conditions warrant.

They have, in short, designed sites that are search-engine friendly and can be easily read by the automated programs, called ‘bots or spiders, that add Web pages to search engine databases.

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