There’s been a lot of buzz recently about the death of search engine optimization. The news that is spreading is that Google and other search engines are discovering better ways to determine what websites should rank high for a keyword and search engine optimization & page rank are going to play a smaller role in the future.
I wrote about this in a couple previous posts:
But it’s not actually dead
I want to amend what I said in previous posts and mentioned that search engine optimization is not dead for some people.
For my website Nick’s traffic tricks search engine optimization really doesn’t matter since most of my traffic comes from twitter, RSS, e-mail list, stumble upon, etc.
However for my “stop hair breakage” website search engine optimization is actually very important. Nearly all my traffic comes from people searching for “stop hair breakage” on Google.
Last month was one of the highest earning months for this website. And I expected to continue to rank well in Google.
When does search engine optimization matter?
This is the question that everyone should be asking. Sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn’t.
It matters when you have a website that is in a specific niche and you have very little competition. When there are only a few thousand websites competing with you it’s quite easy to build a niche specific website, do some basic search engine optimization, and rank high in very little time.
(In fact I show you how to do this step-by-step. Read: How 2 Hours Of Work Makes Me $100 A Month)
Niches get saturated
People find great niches with little competition all the time. But as time goes on other people find out about that same niche and build a website. Suddenly there is competition where there once was none.
Increased competition leads to niche saturation and soon the profits earned by one person have to be shared by many.
The bad news
The bad news is that if your website has a lot of competition search engine optimization will play less of a role in where your site ranks and you will have to find alternate ways of getting traffic.
Google and other search engines are getting smarter about what websites should rank high. So if you have a website with poor content that no one likes it will be increasingly difficult to have a top ranking.
The other bad news is that people are using Google less to surf the web than they used to. I personally have 7 or 8 blogs that I visit when I have some spare time. I find myself clicking the links mentioned on those blogs. I also find new things to visit via my twitter account. I seldom use Google to surf the web these days.
The good news
The good news is that search engine optimization is not that important for blogs and other community building websites. This is great news because search engine optimization was an ongoing game that took time and was a pain in the butt. And in the end I had no real control where my site ranked.
Since it doesn’t matter anymore I can spend time on more important things like:
- adding value to my e-mail list
- writing valuable e-books to go viral
- creating new products
- adding content to my blog
- increasing my twitter following
- building my RSS readership
These are the kinds of things I should’ve been doing from the very beginning instead of worrying that I had the wrong keywords in some meta tag.
Doing these things will add value to your blog, increase the number of return visitors, build confidence and trust with your visitors when you try to sell them something, and will help you go viral with social media.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Nick
I would agree that for sites producing origional content that there are now so many more routes to getting traffic from search engines alone.
I still think it's important to go through the processes you've detailed in your videos to ensure sites at least get indexed by the search engines as I think a lot of people still use a search engine to find a site instead of typing the address into their browser bar.
Regards
Sean
Good point Sean. I may write a post in the future on what SEO techniques still matter.
I never really believed in strongly concentrating on SEO for a blog. In essence it is usually done on static websites such as http://stophairbreakage.org/ , excellent on ranking 1st and 2nd!
I can't tell you what a relief this is for me. I'm still new to blogging and so far it seems like everything I read is all about SEO. A few days ago a friend told me about the proposed change to Google and it got me very worried. Reading this post has helped a lot. One of the reasons I'm so interested in blogging is that I love to write so as long as good content is a part of getting traffic, I feel better about being able to make it in the big, bad, blogging world.
-Moki
If you love writing and do it often then you should be just fine. Don't worry too much about SEO. If people love your stuff then they'll come back and tell their friends.
I haven't really done SEO work that much, but reading this post make me think is it smarter to forget about SEO work and focus on content? Or should for the time being work on search optimization because after all google still uses its old methods for ranking a site.
And a i have a question, when is google expected to change to a new method of ranking?
You should do they basic SEO stuff and not worry about the rest.
Google is constantly changing their method of ranking but they seldom give any info.