SEO and Traffic - Things to avoid
July 10th, 2006 | by ScottIt appears that you're new here, if you like what you read, please subscribe to the news feed or sign up for the Leap eTips news and updates email list. Thank you for visiting :)
Search engines are vital to driving traffic to most web sites. SEO is the art of making your site (and content) more attractive to the search engines’ bots so they will index more of your pages and rank them higher than other’s pages.
Still, there are a few common buzz-words and items that appear on every webmaster forum and can give the newbie an impression that they’re “must do” or “must have’s”… they’re not.
Here’s a secret, if you build a good site with lots of original content that’s attractive to visitors your pages will climb up through the search engines all by themselves. No need to waste tons of time or money trying to ‘force’ yourself into search engine indexes or higher up in rankings. Devote your time to producing quality content and your money (if you have it to spend) to targeted marketing that just gets the word out about your site to the right people–create brand awareness.
PR, or Page Rank is a Google created zero-to-ten rating system that’s supposed to measure how valuable your site is in it’s niche. New sites begin at Zero and every few months Google updates it’s PR ratings and sites begin to rise up. Nobody outside of Google really knows the exact formula for how pages are rated–though thousands will say they do–but a common understanding is that the number of backlinks (links to your site from another site) you have plays some role. It’s also generally believed that backlinks from sites with higher PR’s themselves will carry more weight than links from other low-or-Zero PR sites.
This gets discussed to no end on webmaster forums and the result is site owners are spending tons of time (and even money) trying to get other sites to link to theirs.
Guess what? All that time and/or money could have been spent developing good content for your site that visitors would appreciate and… you got it, linked to from their own sites or blogs. Free backlinks and more content of your own for the search engines to index. That’s time and money well spent.
I’m not saying that advertising or requesting a link from another site is ever a bad idea, it just depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. In many cases, these webmasters who are trying to acquire high PR backlinks strictly because they’re high PR are wasting their time and money. They aren’t looking ahead to see if gaining the high PR backlinks will ultimately benefit them or not–unless their own goal is to raise their site’s PR and then sell links to other webmasters; and the wheels go round-and-round…
If your Internet Marketing goal is just to get large numbers of untargeted or semi-targeted visitors then links on sites with high PR ratings will often help you, they tend to have traffic. But, if your goal is to offer a specific product or service to a targeted market then your time and money might be better spent doing things that will attract those targeted web surfers.
Another pit that I’ve seen people fall into is trying to optimize their sites for a specific search engine. All of the search engines have their own way of indexing and rating your site and pages, so what might get you a good placement with one won’t help–and might hurt–you with another.
I’ve watched site owners spin themselves into circles as they tweak their site for Google, climb up in the index and then realize they’ve dropped in Yahoo, so they begin tweaking for Yahoo and guess what… yep, they start dropping in Google or MSN. It’s like watching my puppy chase her tail, I enjoy the show while at the same time feeling a little bit sad for her.
Here’s my take on working to get to the top of one search engine, they can drop you without notice at any time! It’s the old ‘all your eggs in one basket’ story.
If you build a quality site, validate your HTML/XHTML coding as best you can and develop content for people (not search engines) you’ll find yourself pulling good traffic from all the major search engines soon enough.
Here’s the thing to remember, search engines will bring you great traffic, it’s what they’re designed to do but they do it on their own terms. They (especially Google, Yahoo and MSN) are constantly trying to filter and stop site owners from ‘forcing’ their way into and up their indexes anyway. So don’t bother, let the search engines do their own work. If your site and content are of value to your visitors the search engines will find it and recognize that. Spend your efforts on improving your site for the people who’ll visit it, either with better and more content or by just tweaking it to improve your conversion/sales ratios and you’ll be better off in the long run.
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