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SEO Is Just Good House Keeping
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I read a top post recently about SEO and it got me to thinking about it’s importance. The post talked about building something so remarkable that people would come and use it no matter what and that the cream would rise to the top. I love this idea and agree with it to a large extent but it just doesn’t work like that. Not everybody has the ability to build truly outstanding products or services.
Lets compare it to the real world. SEO is very much like traditional maketing. There are really nice innovative, subtile ways to market yourself and there are more annoying yet effective methods such as leaflet drops, telemarketing, TV advertising and various others.
Lets use a restaurant as an example. The best chef in town will simply cook stunning food and have a simple menu outside his restaurant. His ability will see him rewarded with countless awards, TV appearances and critical acclaim. Word of mouth will be the strongest card in his marketing deck.
His middle of the road restaurant neighbour however who doesn’t have much talent will need to employ a more aggressive strategy (or SEO for the real world). He will need a bright sign announcing that he sells food. He may hire somebody to stand on a nearby street with a sandwich board announcing his special offers. He may drop leaflets in to businesses and homes in the area. He may buy premium spots on restaurants listings sites. He may buy advertising in city guide magazines.
Online works in very much the same way. Not every site is as useful as a Facebook or Amazon. Some sites are very much middle of the road and just like the average restaurant they will have to give themselves a leg up and jump up those rankings by employing SEO and PPC (paid Google advertising).
SEO is a dark art and new websites and services should defientily try and make their sites so amazing that they don’t need to rely on it but at the same time make sure they have the basics right. You can’t ignore it. You would be foolish to ignore it. For all the talk about us finding an increasing amount of our content through things like social search most of us find the things we are looking for through Google. We type in what we are searching for and Google gives us answers.The answers may not always be the best product or service on offer but Google is getting better and the algorithm is depending less on things that can be influenced such as incoming links.
Don’t spend your whole life thinking about SEO but do make sure that you have the basics right and that your house is in order. Add a good service or remarkable content to the mix and you will be on to a winner. We may not like people who rely completely on SEO and it may not be noble as a art form but business is about getting customers to your site/service and SEO is definitely still one of the most effective ways of doing that and will remain so for some time.
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The big difference in my eye’s between SEO and traditional Marketing is SEO providers can be very quickly benchmarked by their position on a search engine query for “SEO” or “Search engine optimisation”
If an provider cant optimise their own site correctly you can quickly decide whether their worth paying to optimise yours.
Yeah that is a good point Ralph and the other thing that I would be doing is checking who they have done work for in the past and seeing how those sites rank now. The big problem is the same as any industry in that there are some guys doing great work but the whole industry is being tarnished by a few cowboys
Hi Niall, great post. I’ve been delivering search engine optimisation in Ireland for a number of years. Prior to that I hav 5 businesses that all used the web successfully to sell online (incl non tech products). Before that I was a software engineer in dell. There are certainly some very bad impressions about seo, which is why I sometimes use the phrase Internet business development, as I feel it describes what I do. I think the most cmon understanding of seo is that combines lots of keywords , some “dark tricks”, some cheap links and voilà a really bad idea can become a google hit. This certainly isn’t the case for the handful of seo’s I know from the web but describes a huge amount of people across the web. We obviously work with a lot of businesses -both web designers and business owners. Creating an online presence can be a mammoth task. You are in a unique situation where you’ve work well and hard at building your own web business. But many business owners have busy non-web based businesses that need to build an online aspect but don’t have the time to spend 6 months learning how to be an online expert as well as being an expert in the business they run, eg a hotel, retailer, manufacturer, accountant. The idea of a web that’s all based on human semantic behaviour is a long way coming andvsocial media is already well abused by black hat seo’s. I sense in you r post that your impression of seo is that it hides over a bad business or cheats somehow. I invite you to engage with us, not commercially, but to talk to us in real life to hear how we go about building an online business. I think people place a lot of confidence in web developers. You’ve met a lot ofvweb developers- how many of them have sold products online? Most Irish web developers have never sold anything online. They sell through word of mouth or referral( i didn’t say all, I say many) and that’s based on experience. My site ranks in the top 3 for both “seo” AND “search engine optimisation”. I have worked with 200 domains in the past few years and made over a million in online sales in just one business of my own in just 3 years. I’ve never lost a client, I’ve walked away from one andvthere is no spam , cheating or short cuts or €10k cheques. All of my current clients are active referrees and I enjoy helping startups and charities for free.
Don’t get me wrong David I think that SEO s vitally important and I think that the people who do it well are essential to any business. You may notice that we just did a decent amount of it ourselves here. I think it has just got a bad name because of a handful of people in the industry seeing the opportunity to make money and jumping in which is the same with our industry with all the gurus offering their services. I suppose at the end of the day it is quality that will shine through just like in any business
All restaurants benefit from word of mouth, but I do not believe that restaurants such as chapter one and L’ecrivain do not engage in other forms of traditional marketing, such as targetting the press, advertising,special offers . So too do all websites including the good ones will benefit from SEO.
SEO definitely allows some of the smaller fish in the pond to poke their head through some of the clutter. Your analogy in the post described it perfectly.