Must watch SEO videos by Matt Cutts; my SEO rant
If there's one blog related to Search Engine Optimization that I think everyone involved in online business should read it's Matt Cutts' blog. For those not familiar with Matt, he's an engineer at Google who gives web professionals amazing insight into the way things work at Google and in the SEO industry in general. His most recent post, SEO Answers on Google Video, contains three short (less than 10 minutes each) videos about SEO. I recommend the videos to anyone from beginner site owners to SEO experts - everyone at any level can learn something from Matt.
The main thing that I took away from watching the videos (which I just finished doing) is that most people focus waaaaay too much on SEO and waaaaay too little on creating a quality site that encourages people to actually want to come back. In the third video, Matt answers someone's question about whether or not it's more important to optimize for search engines or for users and Matt answers that both are important. You can get all the traffic in the world by optimizing your site for SE's, but if your site sucks no one is going to "take action" (buy your product, sign up for your newsletter, or whatever you want them to do).
I'll take the whole thing a step further and say that it's MORE important to have a site that people want to visit than it is to optimize it for search engines. Yes, your site needs to be crawlable by the search engines (Matt makes the point that being able to be crawled is the most important thing you can do for SEO), but, believe it or not, it is possible to drive traffic in other ways than through SEO.
I'll give you an example. My friend runs Detailed Image, a car detailing company that also sells detailing products online. From what I know, they have done little to no SEO, yet are a very profitable business because they drive traffic to their site by paying car forums to let them answer questions on an official "Ask a Detailer" thread. Would more search engine traffic help? Certainly, but had they focused on SEO to the extent that they weren't looking for other effective ways to drive qualified traffic to their site, they would have missed out on the opportunity that they found with forums.
Another example is iPrioritize. How many people do you think actually search for web-based to-do lists (or variations of that)? I've checked, and it's not too many. Most people don't realize that web-based to-do lists even EXIST, so how are they going to search for them? iPrioritize is certainly SEO'd very well for key terms like "organize" and "to-do list" but I can't rely on that traffic to sign up users because most of the time when people search those terms they aren't looking for a tool like iPrioritize. I have been using alternative methods - article writing, promoting with del.icio.us, stumbled upon, & digg, and other viral techniques - and will continue to use those type of methods primarily to drive traffic (a MySpace page is coming soon to attract students) as opposed to constantly tweaking my SEO, because for my site and my business it doesn't make sense to focus on SEO the way other companies do.
SEO is an amazing way to drive traffic to your site for free, but it's not the ONLY way, and you certainly can still get quality traffic and conversions from places other than search engines. Think about how many of your favorite sites you found through search engines and how many you found through other methods (from a friend, a link on a blog or in an article, etc)? My guess is that less than half came from search engines.
The main thing that I took away from watching the videos (which I just finished doing) is that most people focus waaaaay too much on SEO and waaaaay too little on creating a quality site that encourages people to actually want to come back. In the third video, Matt answers someone's question about whether or not it's more important to optimize for search engines or for users and Matt answers that both are important. You can get all the traffic in the world by optimizing your site for SE's, but if your site sucks no one is going to "take action" (buy your product, sign up for your newsletter, or whatever you want them to do).
I'll take the whole thing a step further and say that it's MORE important to have a site that people want to visit than it is to optimize it for search engines. Yes, your site needs to be crawlable by the search engines (Matt makes the point that being able to be crawled is the most important thing you can do for SEO), but, believe it or not, it is possible to drive traffic in other ways than through SEO.
I'll give you an example. My friend runs Detailed Image, a car detailing company that also sells detailing products online. From what I know, they have done little to no SEO, yet are a very profitable business because they drive traffic to their site by paying car forums to let them answer questions on an official "Ask a Detailer" thread. Would more search engine traffic help? Certainly, but had they focused on SEO to the extent that they weren't looking for other effective ways to drive qualified traffic to their site, they would have missed out on the opportunity that they found with forums.
Another example is iPrioritize. How many people do you think actually search for web-based to-do lists (or variations of that)? I've checked, and it's not too many. Most people don't realize that web-based to-do lists even EXIST, so how are they going to search for them? iPrioritize is certainly SEO'd very well for key terms like "organize" and "to-do list" but I can't rely on that traffic to sign up users because most of the time when people search those terms they aren't looking for a tool like iPrioritize. I have been using alternative methods - article writing, promoting with del.icio.us, stumbled upon, & digg, and other viral techniques - and will continue to use those type of methods primarily to drive traffic (a MySpace page is coming soon to attract students) as opposed to constantly tweaking my SEO, because for my site and my business it doesn't make sense to focus on SEO the way other companies do.
SEO is an amazing way to drive traffic to your site for free, but it's not the ONLY way, and you certainly can still get quality traffic and conversions from places other than search engines. Think about how many of your favorite sites you found through search engines and how many you found through other methods (from a friend, a link on a blog or in an article, etc)? My guess is that less than half came from search engines.
posted by Adam McFarland at
7/31/2006 03:28:00 PM
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