I was at an SEO conference a couple of months back and attended hoping to learn a few things, but at the end of the day I walked out a bit disillusioned with the Australian SEO industry and worried about their impact on the future of the web.

As a web standards developer I pride myself in being part of a movement that is contributing to what I see as the future of the web. The usable, accessible and findable web that while obviously provides a professional living for us also doesn’t feel exploitive or destructive. These are standards and ideas that have moved our industry positively forward in the last 5 years.

While sitting in this conference I couldn’t help being reminded of the logging industry in North America and the constant media attention surrounding clearcut logging and it’s effects on the environment.

Clearcutting involves cutting down all trees in one designated area, then leaving the land as it is with no replanting or concern about the negative impacts on the environment. The other methodologies of logging, including reforestation and tree farming, consider these implications on it’s environment and act accordingly, thinking about sustainability and the external factors involved.

What I saw that day was a clear division of two separate industries. One was the SEO professional (the clear cutter), which in my eyes has nothing to do with the web and everything to do with marketing and profit. The other was the web professional, one who takes pride in the work they do and not solely in the ROI’s, CPC’s and UB’s it might have generated no matter what the cost to the end user.

Now I realise this is a generalisation and there are some decent SEO’s out there. SEO is an industry that is necessary if you work for ‘a large, online media corporation’. You do need someone who knows and implements SEO specific methodologies and it’s unrealistic to say you can just rely on building websites that are accessible and web standards compliant.

Saying that, there are way too many other factors that can not be compromised just to get a ‘click through’ from Google. Usability, accessibility and web standards need to be carefully balanced with Search Engine Optimisation techniques. It seems obvious to me to think, “But what happens when the user actually gets to your site through a search engine?”.

By then the SEO has done his job and has moved on to the next forest.