Search Engine Optimization Isn’t Everything
Search Engine Optimization is quickly becoming a core component of every website life cycle as more and more businesses begin to realize the amount of traffic and money that is available online. The days of paranoid users struggling to come to terms with handing over their credit card information are over - people are much smarter and better educated now.
So there’s a lot of money being spent online and it will continue to increase year after year. Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are the hottest IT sectors right now.
With anything that’s “hot”, you get opportunistic people jumping in to make quick buck. Anyone can spend a day or two on the popular webmaster forums to pick up an introduction to Search Engine Optimization. Add in some sales talk and all of a sudden you are an expert worth $100 an hour for consulting.
What many people fail to realize is that a website life cycle isn’t just about Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. These are only two of many pieces to the puzzle that make up a successful website. Try not to get overwhelmed and lost in the hype that is SEO and SEM. Never forget your users!
Your content should be between this many words and that may words, your keyword density should be this and that….. before you know it, you will be concentrating so hard on making it right for the search engines that when robots do take over the world you will be well rehearsed to serve them.
I see far too many people taking SEO way too far and end up modifying site designs or code that may already have been successful in search for that extra boost in ranking. Ok so you gave up that cool flash file in favor of an image+text solution so the search engines could index it better and as a result your ranking went up a few spots and you got more visitors. Do you know what your conversion rate is now? Has it improved or gone the other way? Don’t ever judge success with traffic because I could get you 100000 visitors for $30 but I can almost guarantee they will make no money for you.
A successful website has more than SEO and SEM as I mentioned. Starting with the design, it has to be fresh, attractive, and easy to navigate. The coding has to be clean, well thought out and expandable. The content has to be informative and unique. Then you can add in SEO and SEM to really complete the cycle.
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