What if I ignore SEO?

I agree! you may just hire somebody to do the SEO for you, coz really without SEO you can't easily get the traffic that you wanted for your site. Good luck!

SEO doesn't constitute being a marketer... online marketing isn't all about SEO... it's just a process and quite an unreliable and sketchy process at that.

That is absolutely false -

First stuffing in SEO 2012 is most definitely not "optimization
Second, A good writer can use a phrase and write on the subject increasing the LSI value of the page which is good SEO 2012.



That IS SEO. Its called White hat SEO and in particular is specified as link baiting. The reason why you think you have to ignore SEO is because you are talking about one kind of SEO and yes the most popular one among Imers but that definition is just too limited. SEOs do press releases ask webmasters if they have seen an article on the site and contact media to get coverage from web properties and therefore links. Last time i checked thats basic promoting and it IS the job of a SEO.

I have to agree. Look at it this way. If the average person that comes to your site tends to return again, you are better than 99% of sites. Even if you started with just a trickle but made a site people love, it will grow large over time without you ever thinking hard about SEO.

So which would you say are the best sources of traffic?

Eating the same sandwich every day is considered duplicate content.

Interesting. I worked for a top SEO company and majority of their customers were fortune 500 companies.

Interesting. Don't hear too many people accuse Google of being a scammer and spammer.


I can assure you that none of them would have thrown a website up with no market research (yes, that is a part of SEO as well).

Only losers believe that.

Reading their catalogs doesn't make you their consultant, lol. I can name 100 or more Fortune 500 companies that don't sell fast food. What's your point?

Only scammers and spammers.

Yikes, then follow the link to the scam site that I'm sure the FTC and FDA both would love to shut down and jail Dr. Mark Smith. Dr. Mark Smith is a chiropractor (marketing only to little kids) from Indiana posing as medical doctor who claims a diabetes cure. Another alias is Hooker on the Warrior Forum.

I rest my case.

The term is only used by spammers and scammers. No real business pays any attention to SEO. Google itself only ranks itself #4 or #5 for "search engine." Obviously they could fix that. They don't. They don't care. They care about their customers, not tricking search engines or scamming and spamming.

Which game is that?

After all, "rank high in the search engines" and "have content people actually want" are two entirely different games.

The search engines are trying to find the content people actually want and rank it highly so those people can find it.

Does this mean "content people actually want" or does it mean something else?

Because people are looking for what they want, and the search engines are trying to direct them to what they want, and either you are what they want or you are not.

If you are not, then your SEO optimisation is, in fact, "tricking" the search engines. Just because you decided to make it part of your game doesn't make it any less obnoxious that you're getting people on your site without having what they want.

I'm not picking on you personally. I chose this section of your post from all the posts in this thread because it best illustrates my point, but I could have chosen to quote many of the posts.

It is a misconception that there are 834 million web pages targeting the keyword soccer, or at least as a main key word anyway.

When people think and talk about SEO and keywords they do it back to front.

Think about what a search engine is trying to do ... it takes what a surfer types into the search box and tries to provide a list of the resources that are most relevant to what that surfer needs.

Now this is a very difficult job. Faced with millions and millions of webpages, how does an algorithm choose the most relevant ones? Well computers are not yet so intelligent that they can just read the content and work it all out only from that. So the algorithm has to rely upon other clues too. These include meta tags, headers, likes/+1's, backlinks, surfer history, and so on and so on.

So from a white hat perspective all that SEO is doing is helping the search engine to identify relevant pages, and from a black hat perspective perspective SEO is trying to trick the search engine into assigning to a page an unmerited relevance.

Imagine for a moment that you created a blog about soccer.

So you register a domain name: myfirstblog.com

Then you create a post: myfirstblog.com/myfirstpost.htm with no meta tags or headers or anything, just a blurge of text.

Then you create a second post: myfirstblog.com/mysecondpost.htm which is just another blurge of text.

Now is this really helping the search engine? Not at all.

But if, instead, you registered MySoccerBlog.com

and then you created MySoccerBlog.com/AHistoryOfTheOffsideRule.htm and include meta tags and headers related to the history of the offside rule

and then you created MySoccerBlog.com/FiveASideSoccerBootStudMaterialRules.htm and include relevant meta tags and headers about not being able to make studs from metal, for example,

now you have been a lot more helpful to the search engine.

Furthermore, you have indicated to the search engine that your second post is not relevant to somebody searching for Joan Collins Movies, or poker, or animals rented out to mate with other animals.

Now the big problem here, of course, is that people try to reverse engineer the search engine algorithm and then to game it, which is why the search engine companies modify the algorithms that they use. So while you might have the most relevant webpage*, you might find that you do not rank at #1 in the search engine results because the owner of a less relevant webpage has taken some actions to outrank you.

Now eventually, the algorithm will be changed to make sure that you rank above this other webpage, but that can take time (maybe years). So you might be tempted to take actions that temporarily boost your ranking. DON'T !! Because then you will be a candidate to be demoted at the next algorithm change.

OK, so now imagine that the search engine query is something that the search engine has never seen before (IIRC Google's CFO was interviewed a few months ago and stated that 15% of queries are new). Now imagine how extremely difficult this is for the search engine. It has no history of this search term and seeing which webpages surfers click on, bounce rates, etc. It just has to produce a list of webpages and hope that they are relevant.

This, again, is where white hat and black hat techniques might help/mislead the search engine. In general the search engine has an understanding of related terms, so when it receives a new query it knows what the general subject is about. So your SEO efforts can indicate to the search engine that you are relevant for the related term - which includes LSI, not just headers and meta tags. Now if you write good content, you LSI will be natural and you won't find you rankings dropping at an algorithm change. If you start keyword stuffing you might find that the search engine algorithm change means that you get found out. And as other posts have pointed out, if you write naturally then your readers are more likely to come back than if you write for the search engines and thereby end up with prose that does not flow.

And furthermore, to return to why I quoted the section of the post, this is also how many more results can turn up than there are webpages specifically targeting a keyword. Obviously soccer is not a new search term that Google has never encountered. However, some of those 834 million webpages will have text and tags that Google thinks might be relevant for somebody who wants to know about soccer.

So my advice is that maybe you can ignore SEO when writing your content, to make sure that it is suitable for your (human) surfers. But definitely do not ignore SEO for other onsite SEO - meta tags, internal linking, etc. And white hat offsite SEO is not going to do you any harm, even if you focus on other sources of traffic. And if you want to target search engine traffic then offsite SEO is an absolute must - if you have no backlinks then that tells the search engine that nobody thinks that your content is relevant.



* And just because you think that you have the most relevant webpage it doesn't mean that you do.

I'm going through reading the post and really don't see no one answering your question! If you looking to make some sells from your site using free traffic google or any other search engine then you need to focus on seo! If not don't worry about it! If you focus on writing every day you will get some traffic over the long haul to your site! All Seo is you focusing on telling the engines what your site is about an if someone searching for your term then they want to pull up the relevant site! To make thing easy on the search engines then you want to optimize your site to be relevant. Put You don't have too! You still can make money and get plenty of traffic if you post everyday and you tell 4 to 5 people a day about your site! And if people like your site then they will come back and they will tell other people about your site! The only thing if you Ignore seo it could take a while! I hope this helps!

I must be damn lucky then. It is pretty common for me to completely block my sites from Google. SEO is just simply not the best, easiest, fastest, cheapest, or most consistent way to get website traffic.

78% of visitors to which sites? That is a very important question to ask. Do you think all the sites listed at clickbank really get 78% of their traffic from search engines. Not a chance.

What about facebook? Do they get 78% of their visitors from search engines?

Or how about WF?

Aweber?

I could go on and on and on. SEO is not the only way to do it. But it is the most unpredictable and competitive.

Are you offering a link?

Oh wait, isnt that spamming and scamming? :rolleyes:

Does an affiliate site target only 1 keyword?