Is SEO Really A Waste of Time?
I wrote an article about SEO being a waste of time dead and boy did that ruffle some feathers. I got a fair amount of abuse about it for some reason. A lot of it, from people who did not actually read the article and just took umbrage at the title Forget SEO – It is a Waste of Time
The title was meant to be provocative to generate some healthy debate which it sure did.
Not everyone who read it agreed. Some were keen to show me the results of their efforts and have indeed got some great rankings on google and bing. However, all of them had spent a lot of time and effort getting there. Most of them were established sites, that are well optimised, with a lot of good content and they were generating income from the organic traffic which is great. It is hard work and requires ongoing maintenance to stay there.
Whether they will stay there without continuing with the hard work and required ongoing maintenance has yet to be seen.
The point I was making was that if you value your time then using paid marketing methods is faster, reliable and measurable.
Spending hours trying to create content and then getting links to it through normal channels or from the dark side like PBN’s (Private blog networks) is all well and good but can be expensive in time, money and effort and there is no guarantee it will get you the coveted number one position or, if you do, that it will remain there.
In the Olden Days
In the really early days of ranking a website, you could simply paste your keywords into the front page of your website multiple times and hide it by making the background colour the same as the text.
Then, when google caught onto that, you simply added a bucket load of keyword phrases into the footer of the pages. Linking them to other internal pages and up you popped again.
You could also add hundreds of keywords in the alt text of an image and ‘boom’ you were once again up there with the gods. (well on the first page of google which some people say is the same thing 😉 )
As time went on google got smarter and their algorithm more complex.
So, is SEO worth the effort or is it a waste of time?
Whilst I am of the opinion that SEO should not be the main source of your efforts when building website, brand or business, I am not anti-SEO. That would be stupid. SEO has become a lot more unpredictable and you have little or no control over what google does with its algorithms. They are constantly on the lookout for ways to fill the loopholes that we are constantly trying to find. It is a battle of the wits as they say, and google has the resources and far more ‘wits’ than we do.
Over the years, marketers have come up with some innovative and ingenious ways to trick the search engines into getting a website on the first page of google.
is that if you build your website using good SE optimisation techniques, create great content and build links to it from other relevant sites and social media platforms then you will, of course, rank for some good keyword phrases and, can indeed, bring you some decent traffic which you can then monetize.
Over time, this can generate a substantial income and is well worth doing as part of your marketing strategy
Covering All of You Bases
A few years ago, it was relatively easy to rank a website by using
In fact, the truth is that you should not relay 100% on any traffic method. Diversifying your traffic generation is imperative to ensure that you have control over your business.
Killer SEO Checklist [Infographic] by the team at Capsicum Mediaworks, LLP
