The Ultimate SEO Guide – really?
It’s no secret that How-To books are the most written, most published books out there. It’s got something to do with our desire to share our knowledge, the fact that none of us truly knows it all and the further specialization of our modern-day workforce. Knowing this, I am always amazed at myself when I find I’m in the market for a How-To book. I guess I figure while I’ve been To-ing, they’ve been learning How-To better and I should update my knowledge of Hows and Tos.
I’m also always a little surprised when “they,” in fact, haven’t updated their knowledge. They’re just re-hashing something we all already know. But, as I tell my accountant, the purchase of books and reference material is an investment in the future.
My latest forward investment was a book called “The Ultimate SEO Strategy Guide.” A quick disclaimer, I’ve been a web content person for nearly a decade, and watched, albeit through occasionally photon-burned eyes, as these technologies developed from their infancy into the super-sleek high-tech versions of themselves that we all play with today. I was looking for a refresher again thinking while I’d been Doing, the How-Toers were researching, when I came across this book.
One of the factors that I always question, the primary reason I tend to seek out new information on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is that I can’t quite get my head around Google’s search secret. I’ve read about links (exchanges, reciprocal, back, deep and otherwise), tags, meta content, indexing, robots.txt and spam. I’ve worked with dozens of companies, some with long-term websites, others just jumping into the Big Bit Bucket. Some with aggressive and active online marketing initiatives, others with (my personal favorite) the “we’re known worldwide, so no, we don’t do PPC” attitude.
The only thing that really seems to make a difference in traffic, aside from how interesting or timely your content is, would be how much your content resonates with users. I like the idea that a person can influence how traffic visits their website, but experience tells me otherwise. If your content is good enough, people will come.
And therein lies the dilemma. Your content may well be good enough. It may well be a head-and-shoulders above most of what’s out there. But not all of it. Keyword research can give you an idea of how bad the odds are for your website, how brutal the competition really is. I once read there were six web pages for every person on the planet as of 2003 (that makes the counted pages somewhere around 36-billion plus). Research indicates that 42% of all traffic goes to the first website that appears on the list. The rest is split up among the next nine. So why bother?
Because if you do have worthwhile content and take the time invest in some SEO planning, you can in subtle ways affect your website’s traffic.
