Do I HAVE to do SEO to survive

SEO is essential no doubt about it if you list your site in Google Places you will start to see quite a bit more traffic

It depends on the niche in my opinion.
I've "dominated" certain niches without any search engine traffic at all.
But in your case I would suggest that you do seo.

/Izerman

SEO is not essential.

It is just one form of traffic generation. And, in my opinion, a shaky one. Webmasters spend months and months optimizing their site and writing content for Google. All the while, having to worry if a huge portion of their traffic is going to disappear when the next algorithm change is put in place.

I, personally, don't even bother with Google (or any search engine) and I have been steadily increasing my traffic everyday.

While you may see a large amount of people spouting the absoluteness of SEO'ing for Google, these are the same people who you will see posting threads like, "Site disappeared from rankings - 80% of traffic lost overnight... help!" when Google implements new changes and drops their site.

While SEO has its place in a traffic generation campaign, I'd recommend to focus on getting direct traffic through other sources. The key is diversity. This ensures that your business is not relying heavily on any one traffic source.

This thread may help you:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...technique.html

Since your site is based on articles I would say you are missing on A LOT of potential traffic not being concerned about SEO. A LOT!

SEO is of course essential. At first you need to make sure you have done onpage SEO properly.

The best SEO practices for the real time are those that seem to be nonexistent.

SEO can and usually will give you the slowest traffic return but many of us find it beneficial to always keep it in mind. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to SEO (both on and off) their content and still make it very readable.

Using quicker traffic generation techniques in the forefront and building a SEO empire in the back end gives you traffic at all stages of the game and also allows for long term and at some point effortless traffic in the not so distant future.

SEO like many other forms of marketing, is simply a medium used to distribute your information.

Just like radio, television, and even facebook.

Sure you can survive without it, but you're missing out on a very big opportunity to capture a huge percentage of your market..

The idea is to go where your customers are.

So you really have two options:

You can go were a few of your customers are, or you can go where they all are.

I recommend learning the basics of SEO and outsourcing the rest.

I have done a lot of SEO on site, I use thesis wordpress theme that helps a lot, its just I dont want to duplicate any content on the internet by posting to article sites...

You don't have to do it. It's one of the traffic techniques. You can do it, you can ignore it. If you have good value on your website, you'll get natural SEO traffic (others will link to you).

Try to optimize 3-5 pages with long-tail keywords, and see. Test it on a small scale.

Use other traffic techniques at the same time (SMM, word of mouth, networking on blogs & forums, buy ads... etc). Use G analytics to pinpoint the good traffic sources, and repeat them.

Hope that helps.

K.

SEO is essential, the problem is that SEO has been given a bad name.

SEO is simply a way to improve your visibility to the different search engine spiders. Google actually encourages you to do SEO as per its guidelines: correct titles, inside linking your content (no dead end pages), tell the spider what your website is about in the meta description and more. All of this allows the spider (in this case G's) to crawl your website efficiently so as to be able to offer the best visibility upon search results.

The above is what these days is called on-site SEO. Off-site SEO, which refers to links and the stuff you mention (pyramids, link tiers etc), is important yes, but these days the off-site SEO that is important is stuff which you can only influence via writing QUALITY content. Why? Because up to a year ago, one could do plenty of mischievous methods to affect the search engine visibility via influencing backlinks in a manner contrary to Google's guideline. Fortunately, this doesn't work presently, at least to the extent that is used to. I love how my competitors disappeared from Google and now I am above the fold for page 1 for a hugely sought keyword (and making almost 5 digits per month from it) because all I did is play G's game (mind you, I started as a blackhatter and know how to fool the game, even to this day).

So what works for off-site SEO? Getting contextual backlinks from high PR pages. What this means in layman's terms? Someone decides to link to you because he/she deems you as an authority and your linked page will be of use to his readers. This is what Google LOVES. Gone are the days off commenting on articles, forums and using private networks.

My advice is to get your on-site SEO working good (follow G's guidelines) and to write absolutely awesome content that would be shared and respected by authors in the field. You can still do blackhat but Google is rolling mini updates every month which they don't make public and which are destroying websites which used SEO companies.

Depending on what niche you're in, there's plenty of traffic to be had from Bing and Yahoo with relatively little SEO. Pre panda most of my traffic was from G, but now Bing is my main provider, and it converts better too!

SEO should never be your number one strategy to drive traffic to your website or blog. It can be and should be a small percentage of it. I see way too many people who are just too focused and too obsessed about this that they drive themselves up the wall.

You should always focus on other advertising avenue like PPC, article marketing, video marketing, find other HIGH traffic websites in your niche and see if you can advertise on their site, blog commenting.

SEO is absolutely not the most essential strategy you should pursue although it is quite a good one, especially if you are just starting out. In the long run though, high quality content beats SEO content.

Who is smarter? The person who writes SEO articles and uses traditional mass submission .. the person who uses a more targeted syndication approach or the person that just does a Google search for the keywords bringing the traffic ... contacts those on the top fold of those results and proposes a media buy?

Don't know who is smarter but the latter has a lot more time to do other things .. like spend too much time on the WF lol.

SEO is crapola, and it's boring too

Tell you the cold hard truth buddy? no you don't have to do seo.

Why? I have got my blog to get over 7000+ visitors per month from SEARCH ENGINES using NO SEO only providing killer content.

but, seo is still important and if you have some problems with seo(I do) you can save from your salary and hire a specialist to do the SEO work for you.

does this help?

But the truth is, most people start there web searching at google.com
How the hell are all those "random" people gonna gind you when they mostly just trust google to find what there looking for.

I remember when we just had an internet connection in 1999? I actually was guessing URL names sometimes but that time is over, people are using search engines to find what there looking for, and that mostly the best way to actually find what you're looking for. So I think you almost "have to" do SEO to exist on the internet, at least if you care about getting traffic.

Traffic takes time to accumulate which is normal. Focus on mixing your link building with different types of links. Get more content links from guest posts and such. You need something to get you known without the annoying hassle of just building links. Rankings take time, not an overnight thing sadly.

No, SEO isn't needed. For some niches, it really isn't all that effective. And you can get traffic by buying it or doing JVs or getting affiliates to do SEO for you.

On the other hand, knowing basic SEO is very beneficial, and it goes beyond just Google. Many sites have simple search engines, including forums, etc.

Even free lance writers that submit articles to directories can benefit from basic SEO by including keywords publishers may use to find articles. For example, if you submit an article to ezinearticles.com in the hopes it will be republished, including words publishers may use in the ezinearticles site search can greatly increase your odds of having your article found.

The same with sites like Twitter, where understanding how their search engine works and the use of #hashtags is another benefit of understanding basic SEO principles.

Even the Warrior Forum has a basic, but well-used search function.

While none of these secondary search ideas will bring loads of traffic over-night, over the course of your IM career, the impact can really add up.

Get to know the SEO basics and get a grasp on what keywords will likely bring you the most traffic. For these secondary search resources you don't need to worry about competition. Instead, just focus on the main keywords that will bring the most eyeballs.

The only SEO I use is common sense. Well, technically, I do keyword research prior to writing articles and blog posts, but then I write for people first.

Survive?

Yes, I have been doing it the same way for 5 years (full time) and have never had a problem when Google changes their algorithm.

The funny thing is that by writing for people first, I actually do better in the long run. When everybody seems to be whining about "bad old Google" making changes, I'm usualy quite happy because my sites get ranked even higher.

If keywords are part of SEO, then I do some, but it will always be a "people first" proposition for me.

All the best,
Michael

seo is a must needed one, But the main thing is, how you are going to use it. If your main site is getting low traffic because it is not ranked due to hard competition then rank the youtube video and get referral traffic. You have to experiment more to get good traffic these days.

You will not see quick result of your SEO. Doesn't mean have to leave it, but maximizing other methods to get instant-traffic may be needed.

Maximize your Facebook, Twitter & YouTube account (and other social media approach) to get referral traffic that targeted.
And other paid traffic will work and give the result faster.

Social media is a very solid way to start and if done right (with highly viral content) it can transition into a fully natural and unpaid SEO campaign. In other words, with SEO you want to secure links, etc .. - With a good piece of content shared through social media you'll get referral traffic + people will link to your site because they like it.

The key with social media tho.. is developing relationships with people who have thousands upon thousands of followers or cutting deals with people who own fully developed/aged accounts. Posting a great piece of content in a brand-new account that has 5 followers and expecting the same results as posting on an acc which has 500K followers is just silly

You dont have to do SEO. So many other methods to get traffic for free. One example... Youtube.

Nope... as long as you have a steady supply of food and water, and a place to sleep at night, you'll survive!

In all seriousness... there are MANY quality traffic sources that don't rely one iota on SEO, and you could easily "survive" on any one of them so long as you know what you're doing. Here are just a handful of them, off the top of my head...

* JV's / affiliates
* Your own mailing list
* Other people's mailing list (paid solo ads, ad swaps, etc)
* PPC / contextual ads
* Media buys
* Direct traffic from video sharing sites (ie YouTube)
* Article syndication
* Guest blogging
* Social networks
* Forum signatures & forum paid ads
* Classified ads
* Directory submissions (ie software directories, ebook directories, niche directories, etc)
* Offline advertising (direct mail, flyers, radio, TV, etc)

Pick one, and get survivin'!