Bitter Sweet SEO

This has been a post that has been building within myself for some time now. Even more so with Dave Naylor touching on the almost never switched off mode that an SEO must endure. Simple, enjoyment of browsing the web is almost overtaken by the need to know why that page was shown as relevant in Google to rank highly for the search term you just entered.

As, most readers of this blog are aware I rarely ever post about SEO nowadays, preferring to steer the blog to an overall search marketing genre. I love people, and being a person who is fascinated yet forever disengaged with the physical aspect of social engagement throws myself into a conundrum.

I’ll put it down to my age but the remote idea of sitting within a group and talking dribble alienates myself, literally. I’m a one-on-one person, its where I excel. In group mode, there are far too many wanting to be heard, liked or just to be noticed. Its a false commodity and because the person who is usually the loudest gets heard becomes the focus of attention throws my eyebrows to droop over my eyes even more. Being loud is my pet hate, except when drunk, possibly why I hate myself being drunk. But, the thought of those that manically go out of their way to be noticed in this way is disengaging to say the least.

Any ways, getting back to my point of being totally focused on what pages are being propelled into the high positions for your search queries has continually been an obsession of mine especially when a client is involved.

Any time you have ever copied a high ranking sites links have you ever really studied its back link analysis? Did you ever wonder of the page the link was within was even featured in Google’s cache? If so, when was it last cached? Or, how many links were pointing to the site that hosted the link? If you have went this far then you’ll also check the sites linking to your proposed link drop. What I’m getting at is do you just take that link for granted, that’s what helping the page your checking out to rank, or do you pull it aside and examine it more privately, find out if the noise / signal level is all that its cracked up to be?

But this is where it really gets me! People who call you telling you its just the links I’m interested in - “show me your link building costs!”, they proclaim. Hell, the majority of the time they could rank so much better with on-page management that link building is just a by-product of how their site could become successful. If they were just to focus on getting their site tuned to its most prominent strength they would see success in their original ranking / traffic. To me link building is important but its not the be all and end all that some people think is required to gain those much sorted seeds without sorting out their own on-site problems first.

Trying to explain this to potential clients that SEO is like a sour plume sweety - meaning its a joyous hell - that you may have to endure for many months before your site is flavour of the month with Google’s taste buds is a non-starter in many instances. Get them interested in On-Page as well as Off-Page you have a greater chance of success quicker.

I’m not only the only one batting the drum to clients explaining that SEO is just one of a few strategies to be used online to help them gain more visibility and thus sales / conversions. Clients need to be aware that there are other routes worth looking at to help promote themselves online. Primarily, focussing on SEO (both on-page and off-page) is a great way to introduce them to all the other flavours that exist in your shop instead of just getting them to suck on a bitter sweet sweetie for the rest of their online days.