Not long ago I was clicking through one of my favorite sites and came across another article exhorting the importance of search engine optimization. The article was well written and pointed out all the reasons why and how optimizing your site would result in miraculous changes, if you would only follow the writers advice. After I finished reading the article, out of curiosity, I followed the link back to his site to check it out.

I have a tool bar that shows the rank of each page that I visit and I noticed that his web site only had a page rank of 3. I found that surprising. If SEO is so important, then why would someone so knowledgeable on SEO have such a low page rank?

To appease my curiosity, I decided to look into the matter a little further. I selected 5 popular, business related, keywords and did a search of each of the keywords. I then visited the top ranked site of each keyword and viewed the source code of each of the web sites to see how much optimization they had done.

I realize that this simple little “exercise” is in no way scientific and no concrete conclusions can be drawn from the results, but, None of the top ranked sites were optimized at all. Zero, zilch, nada! They all used javascript extensively, which is supposedly a no no, they were table based, also a no no, alt tags were omitted or not properly used and on and on.

Wow, this is a real brain-teaser. We have been force-fed the SEO doctrine for low these many years and yet, the top ranked web sites have no optimization. Could it be that it’s all just been a load of hooey?