Scott Watermasysk, Community Server genius, recently commented on an article regarding poor SEO techniques.  The author says

"Concentrate on building a quality service. One that people will actually WANT TO BOOKMARK and comeback to."

Scott wraps it up saying SEO efforts are wasted if your service is bad and/or your site sucks.

To which I left the following comment.

"Seems though that if you put new crud out there on a regular basis and it's formatted well (according to Google, not the user) then you get good search engine rankings.

That leads to the ever going debate at my company, do you measure SEO only on rankings or traffic from search engines that led to sales? If it's sales based then yes, compelling content and great service will help, but if its just SERP (as most SEO consultants go by) then no, quality of content or service to the user doesn't matter."

I have some amount of sympathy for the SEO consultant or works his/her hind off getting a site ranked well in the engines.  Unless the site owner agrees to an expensive site overhaul and/or pay-per-click campaigns there is not a ton of work you can do (~ oh shameless plug~ unless of course you take a look at what my company has to offer).

So what is an SEO expert left to measure his/her success with? Search engine rankings, and it's at that point he/she has to throw up his hands and say "look, I got them there, you have to sell them".  Basically SEO provides warm leads, the site has to close the deal.

So let's all hug our SEO people today, please?