I recently asked a question on a local Refresh mailing list, which mainly consists of developers, with a few designers, copy writers and other web professionals thrown in (but very few marketing and SEO people). I'd recently heard a developer refer to SEO as "white noise" and essentially a con, which struck me as pretty naive. I know that attitudes such as that were common a few years ago (and back then, they may even have been warranted, up to a point), but I had thought that things had moved on a lot since, especially amongst web professionals.

Anyway, my question was just about whether or not people shared that opinion. The answers I got back and the ensuing (very good natured, non-flamey!) debate really quite shocked me. The general consensus amongst developers especially seemed to be,

• if you have good content and a well engineered site, SEO is indeed white noise
• SEO is largely about filling in the meta tags and keyword stuffing
• SEO is generally only used artificially to rank poor web sites - if you have a quality site it is unnecessary
• SEO pollutes the SERPs
• There is a constant war going on between Google and SEOs (which is true for black hat, of course, but we weren't talking about black hat)
• (I should also point out that there were a lot of good, constructive comments)

It was that first point that particularly surprised me. Of course, having quality content and a well built web site is extremely important for SEO, and you shouldn't start a campaign without them. It was the idea that that is all you need, and that SEO is superfluous after that point, that really got me. I'm sure most of you would agree.

This strikes me as important for two reasons,

1. Our clients' developers are obviously pretty important to our own efforts, and having their buy-in helps a lot. If they see our art as "white noise" that can't really help matters!
2. Developers are potentially a great source of revenue for SEO businesses -- if they're in-house, they can argue your cause with a potential client, or if they're freelance you can partner with them to deliver services

Any thoughts on this? Does this group seem particularly naive, or are these outdated views still common in the development community? And if they are, what can we do, as a community, to change them?

(NOTE from Rand: I really like the last question - what CAN we do as a community to change them?!)