Figuring Out SEO

Hey people, I can say this until I am blue in the face and still nobody ever seems to listen.

When you build a website you build for your customers not the search engines.

If you are considering SEO in every click of the mouse or touch on the keyboard, then you have lost sight of what your website is really about.

Your website is about communication with your customers. Giving them the information and confidence they need to buy from you or use your services over the other thousands of choices they have.

Worrying about deleting a link or using the same word too many times in a page is just pointless.

The fact is, just adding one more page to your website with a short article will do more than you can ever do by tweaking the meta tags, counting links or managing the locations div's on a page to meet size requirements and heading values.

Come on people, seriously. You add a heading #1 to the page then use css to make it smaller so the page looks correct but the searches think you have big text and that that keyword is more important than others.

The fact is, SEO is not that big a deal anymore. Simply because the search engines pay less attention to what is on your page and more attention to what other people are saying.

If people search google for "thenameofyourbusiness.com" rather than just going there directly, well google assumes that that site is more popular than others.

Now if your visitors can't grasp the concept of direct dialing rather than using 411 assistance, then that helps you. But if your users bookmark or use the browser to go to your site directly, you could seem invisible to google even though you have millions of visitors.

Are people tweeting about you? Are they blogging about you? Are they raving about you on facebook?

Well, like most business they are not and that counts against you.

Do you have a google webmaster account, google plus account or google adsense? Google gets data about your site from those tools, s you might be telling google how many visits you have, how many people buy and so on, then they decide what to do with that.

So its no wonder that hosting companies like Godaddy.com, Web.com and 1and1.com get more traffic than a small home based business like pageBuzz.com.

Because the search engine follows trends, they look at earnings, are you publicly traded, do you have a phone book listing and so on and on and on.....

None of these things have anything to do with your website.

But you look at your stats and you see traffic from the search engines. You are afraid to make changes as it might drop you in the searches.

I have to tell you, it wont.

There are so many factors about search engines that you don't have control of, that you can't modify or manipulate.

And why do they do that?

Because you people are obsessed with beating the odds, with getting ranked and with tricking them to get traffic.

So they have taken it out of your hands. They have factored in so many variables that you can't influence so the listing are fair and unbiased by SEO experts and webmasters.

But then that would mean SEO is pointless, right?

Not necessarily. It is still important to have the right content, lots of pages, page titles and keywords in the pages. After all, that is the base point all searches use to start the ranking process.

But beyond that, just do your thing. Add pages, write articles and image sand so on.

Do what your customers need, so them what they are looking for.

If you sell air conditioners, show them demos, show them ratings so them how to install them.

I see companies like HomeDepot with how to videos on products they sell. Demonstrations and projects that you might do using tools you buy from them.

But on your website I see nothing.

So when customers post on facebook I just built a bird house with instructions I downloaded from homedepot.com the search engines see that as a win for homedepot.

What did they post about your website?

Probably nothing, because while home depot was adding interesting content for their customers, you were busy researching meta tags and seo tricks that were phased out many years ago.

The only way to rant high is to have what people want. Diverse content, value to readers and people doing research.

If I am looking to buy an air conditioner why use you over homedepot?

They have reviews, ratings, videos on how to install it and you have a 10 word description and a price.

So instead of adding new pages over the last few years, you signed up for webmaster tools, added every seo trick in the book but never considered what was important, your actual customers.

I can't expect small businesses to build million page websites like lowes or homedepot, but I can expect more than 5 pages.

If you have been obsessed with SEO instead of developing your website then you missed out on great opportunities and probably lost a load of business.

Just flush the whole concept of SEO out the window and build a website that makes sense as a marketing tool.

You remember marketing right? Well, nothing has changed, only your choice to ignore it in pursuit of the perfect SEO score.