I dislike the term search engine optimisation (SEO), though I understand its appeal. High visibility in search results delivered by the likes of Google and Yahoo is important to most businesses, and critical to some. Nevertheless, the idea of optimising a web site for search engines is wrong-headed; sites should be optimised for users, not robots.

This scepticism is reinforced by the number of false and misleading statements put out by some SEO specialists. “We aim to get all web sites that take our search engine optimisation internet marketing package onto the first page (if not the top) of all major search engines,” says one company on its home page, plucked at random from the 29 million results Google claims to find on the subject. The statement is meaningless, since it omits a critical point: what the user is searching for. If it is your company name, then achieving a first-page ranking should be trivial in most cases, but most users do not search for that. They search for what they want.

Worse still, incompetent SEO will actually drive users away. Misguided consultants may suggest techniques such as hidden text, scattergun link exchanges, or delivering different pages to web crawling robots than to real users, all of which will get your site lower ranking or even expulsion from the major search engines. Another common sales pitch is an offer to submit to hundreds of online directories and search sites, when in reality there are few that matter and submission is easy.

If SEO is of doubtful value, what can be done to drive more traffic to a site? The short answer is to improve the site. Some of the consultants who can help firms to achieve this may even call themselves SEO experts, and I realise that there is genuinely valuable expertise out there alongside the hype. Yes, it is worth making sites easy for search bots to index, but it is human effort that makes the biggest difference.

The most effective form of SEO is inbound links from sites that are both popular and relevant to your own. Getting the right people to mention your name sounds to me a lot like public relations, and that is exactly the point. The SEO concept will disappear as the internet matures. It will be subsumed by web design, marketing and PR.

Daryl Wilcox, who runs online services for the PR industry, has written a white paper about how traditional PR is losing out to the search marketers. From the customer’s point of view, it matters little whether SEO consultancies become PR agencies, or vice versa. What counts is to realise that SEO is just another way to invest in communications, and not an independent niche.