Ben Bleikamp's blog about technology and college

Stop Worrying About SEO

Getting high search engine rankings is nice but what happens when people finally start showing up to your site?  If you spent all your time making sure you were in the top three results on the Google and none of your time writing content, you’re screwed.

I’ve written about SEO in the past and I am not completely dismissing its benefits. However, I think too many bloggers spend too much time worrying about PageRank, SERPs, etc.

Worrying about SEO is stupid

First of all, SEO is easy. Anyone can learn it. You optimize a few title tags, use header tags correctly, and build some backlinks and you’ll suddenly rank on the first page of Google. Anyone who tells you it’s hard is lying. If anyone can learn it, chances are you don’t have a very big competitive advantage by optimizing everything. The hardest part is building backlinks, and guess where that comes from? Good content.

Second, why pin your business’s success on whether or not another business’s algorithm notices your site? In most other sectors you’d be laughed at for pinning your business’s success so heavily on another company. What happens to your business if Google goes bankrupt? What happens if Google removes you from the rankings? There are too many variables.

Third, Google is constantly changing their algorithm and their rules. Even if you do everything right today, it could change tomorrow. If you do something that Google deems “evil,” you get to start over. It sucks, right? But it’s Google’s search engine - even if it is running on thousands of servers and indexing the entire web, it’s theirs, and they can change the rules whenever they want.

What you should worry about

Start worrying about writing compelling content that keeps users coming back. Start worrying about how many subscribers you have. Start writing content that is worth linking to. I am not going to link to a site about mesothelioma. I am not going to link a site packed with poker advertisements. I do not care about those topics, and even if I did, I’m guessing I could find better sources of information than websites packed with advertisements.

Why does Wikipedia rank so highly for search results? People link to it. Why do they link to it? It’s (relatively) unbiased, it’s useful, and the writers generally do a great job of explaining a given topic.

If you give people what they want, it won’t matter where you rank in the search engine, they’ll find you. Maybe you’ll even get linked to by the guy sitting in the number one spot for your search term. But don’t get too excited if you do - he might not be number one for long.

If your content is designed for search engines and Google AdSense, then guess what? You shouldn’t be ranking high in Google. I don’t want to see your content. The web is about information. I want to access the best information as quickly as possible - that means if you’re not producing content for users, you’re useless. Go back to 2001.

The big finish

Anyone with a website needs to start thinking about the life time value of users. Every business student in the country has heard the term “life time value” but it seems a lot bloggers and publishers ignore the concept. Getting people to show up isn’t even half of the battle - anyone can get traffic. Getting people to stick around, getting them to come back, and getting them to subscribe? That’s where the money is.

Offer users something they want, or better yet, something they need. If you do, they’ll reward you with loyalty. Once you have a strong group of loyal users your blog, your web app, whatever it is, will grow like crazy. A lot of people think loyal users are great because they tell their friends about you. That’s cool. But loyal users are great because they’ll spend money on you or things you recommend.