Why I Don't Focus on Traditional SEO

As a business owner online who wants natural organic listings in the search engines, your main objective is to please Google and play by their rules. The reason being, Google are the biggest search engine with about 60% of the market share and generally, if you rank well in Google, you’re likely to rank well in MSN, Yahoo and the other search engines.

Most of the traditional search engine companies focus on ensuring you have the right keywords as well as right keyword density on the pages of your site (on page factors), whereas Google relies more on a linking structure or backlinks from other credible sites (off page factors), to determine how relevant your page content is to the term that a searcher online types into Google as well as how credible your site is.

See http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html for more information on how Google’s linking structure works and how they determine the credibility of your site.

Now, the problem with just focusing on keyword placement and, contacting other website owners to ask them to link back to your site is that some website owners will want to charge you to have a link on their site nowadays which, can actually get you into serious deep waters with Google … though a long-standing debate, it’s not all bad but again, you need to play by Google’s rules if you want to pay for links.

What could also be an issue is if you decide for whatever reason that you don’t want to pay for links any longer … you could end up losing a whole bunch of credible links overnight. The net result (no pun intended) is that you’ll loose your ranking, meaning less traffic and less money … overnight! And when Google decided to come down hard on perpetrators of link buying in December 2006, it left a lot of companies struggling over the Christmas period so, be warned. Do your due diligence to ensure you’re not violating Google’s terms of service before getting into link buying.

So, to answer my own question though, why do I not focus on traditional search engine optimization strategies?

My focus is on “findability.”

How can I get more people to find my site or, your site, on the Internet. Or put another way, how do I get more people to find me online and still get quality incoming links to my site from other credible websites at zero costs.

I think Mike Filsaime, successful Internet Marketer said it best at the UK World Internet Summit in 2006. He referred to strategies that get you backlinks as “throwing seed out on the Internet.” He then went on to say that getting traffic from this seed may not be as instant as Pay-Per-Click traffic, but it grows and grows and long-term will give you a great return on investment.

I’ll add to that by saying it will get you an awesome amount of credible backlinks to your site too.

Some of the best ways to get backlinks to your site are:

• Blog posts
• Submitting articles to article directories
• Submitting your RSS feed to feed directories
• Podcasting (audio broadcasting)
• Video broadcasting
• Commenting on other people’s blogs
• Web PR
• Forum commenting

By using these methods, it’s not just a matter of getting links to your site from credible sites, it’s about “spreading your seed on the Internet.”  What you want to achieve is popularity … whenever people search the forums, the search engines, article directories etc using variations of the keywords you want to rank for, you want them to find some reference to yoursite.com.

And more importantly, when they click on yoursite.com, you want them to find good quality content.

I’ve never personnally bought into the fact that you have to put your product in front of a prospect sevent times before they’ll buy, but if you do believe that, this must be the easiest and most economical way of presenting your product to your prospects.

In addition to the exposure, it will also give you more branding power because you’re not limited to just getting your message distributed via the search engines or links, people can find you on blogs, in article and RSS directories, iTunes, YouTube, GoogleVideo etc.

In my view, these are actually far more powerful strategies than just focusing on keyword density and approaching other webmasters for links … though take note that I am not suggesting these are ineffecitve nor, should they be abandoned (though reciprocal linking are now seen by some search engines as spam – another post for another day) but I will say that I’d rather spend my valuable time writing good quality articles and submitting them to article directores than spending hours writing to other webmasters for links.

Hope this helps you put search engine optimization into perspective as well as give you a good idea of where you should be spending your money as well as your time.

Related posts:

1. Getting Indexed By Google
2. 3 Ways To Get Your Blog Off To A Flying Start