There… I said it! I said it because I see all of the money spent on search engine optimization by small to mid-size businesses and I think it’s a racket. Here’s my view of the search engine optimization industry:
The majority of Search Engine Optimization falls within writing great content, attracting authoritative backlinks to that content and following a few important best practices. These are all basics that anyone can follow – but most do not.
I still see a slew of new sites hitting the market that are image heavy and text light, that don’t utilize simple elements like headings, subheadings, etc… and don’t put a simple sitemap that a search engine can crawl. These tips, which I’ve written about over and over on my blog and see over and over on other blogs will get your site 99% of the way.
The fact is this: If you write frequent relevant content that incorporates keywords and phrases that searchers are looking for, your site will be found. The impact of that content will dwarf any tweaking that any SEO expert can achieve. Stop wasting your money and start writing content!
So many folks like to argue the secrets of search engines on things like URL length, outbound links, nofollow, etc, etc… but they’re only playing in the 1%. Sure, for some businesses, that little 1% can be the difference in millions of dollars… but for you and me, it’s bunk.
The other secret of the industry is 99.99% of your competition doesn’t have a clue what they’re doing. Write relevant, compelling content and you can win the battle on search.
