Guest post: Web consultant and copywriter Rhett Soveran is the web editor of WestJet’s up! magazine and is far too proud of his personal blog, Bailing Bucket.
In the last year I have sat through three search engine optimization (SEO) workshops. One because the workshop wasn’t described properly by some tricksy hobbits, no doubt. But the other two were because SEO was sold as a company saving opportunity. Who knew the saviour would show up at a professional office wearing a Hawaiian tshirt? That seriously happened. SEO is not going to save you unless you have a very niche business. You should be aware of SEO principles and follow the general guidelines, but the fact that there are large men going around Canada in winter in Hawaiian tshirts is a step too far. Do not pay these people — even if you like those beach shirts (I am judging you if you do). It is like building a house and making sure the walls are straight. That’s it. If you have good titles, meta descriptions, anchor text, keywords and content then you’re all set. You are search engine optimized.
Optimizing your site for search engines will not necessarily mean:
- You’ll be on the front page of Google for you search terms
- You’ll make more money
- You’ll automatically own the search in your market
Inbound links – the 800 pound gorilla in the room So I’ve sat through all those workshops. I’ve personally read hundreds of articles on different search engine strategies. I’ve even written a few. But there is never enough time given to inbound links. Search engines work on popularity. If a popular website links to you that makes you more popular (and vice versa). If you did no SEO at all but had a lot of great inbound links it wouldn’t even matter because if search engines see that you are a popular it will work hard to index you, no matter how crappy your site is. I suspect that inbound links aren’t talked about because there isn’t much more to add and getting those inbound links from popular sites is extremely difficult. It doesn’t help sell your services to say “This part of SEO really sucks and you will probably never get the kind of links that will really help.”
SEO will not save your business, but it will help Just don’t get too wound up about SEO. Be conscious, but don’t let it get any bigger than it needs to be because it can get out of hand fast and it will cost a lot. The only reason you should hire someone to do SEO is because you don’t want to do/learn it yourself (and I get that because it’s not fun). But you don’t need anyone with specialist or expert on their card. They read all the stuff that I did online (for free) and are now charging you a lot to do it. If you are a partially savvy internet user you can learn it all in a day and have your site optimized in a week and then just follow the principles I laid out above (and it won’t cost you much).
This is good in terms of SEO. Nothing seems to annoy against it compared to that.