An 80/20 rule for time spent on Google issues?

[AjiNIMC]

This is my opinion, what do you think about it.

If you have an online company IMO you should apply AIM 80-20 rule of online marketing.

Invest 80% of your time on visitor experience, business building, people management, budgeting, business model risk management, infrastructure improvement, .....etc

Invest 20% of the time on search engine marketing (google guidelines): Why?

• As search engines gives you almost 80% of your new visitors (most of the cases).
  
• If you are not aware of latest happening you may end up losing something. Like Google sitemap, webmaster tools, no follow tags for paid ads, dynamic url management, duplicate content, robots.txt, crawling problems, ... e.tc
  
• Search engines want to rank good sites so by reading their sites you can get some technical improvement ideas like faster sites, cleaner sites, not linking to bad neighbourhood e.t.c
  
• Search engines are studing about online behaviour so from SEs we can learn something about online behaviours. Example google having problem with JS links, your users can have it too. So better to have an alternative that they can navigate to the other sections of the site.
  

Waiting for your opinion?

[tedster]

I agree with you very much -- the site itself is the core of your effort. In my case most of my professional time is spent directly on SEO, but the total team for any site I work with is probably giving 80% of its resources to the core of the site.

It can be quite difficult for the smaller web business, where there are just a few people wearing many hats, to have enough objectivity about their "baby". Very easy to read this or that bit of information and just assume "that couldn't apply to our site". This is true in both the 80% core area and the 20% SEO area. How many people just recently woke up to the fact that Google considers them a "thin affiliate" for instance? Ot that their fancy and beautiful interface was causing users to Back-Button out.

How many people spend NO time looking at their server log analysis, or even understand the assumptions that are built into the reports that they do look at? I find that some jolt is often needed to break us out of our routines ways of spending the 80% (especially).

[AjiNIMC]

I think spending more than 20% of the time is not worth.

Also spending less than 20% of the time is not advisable as SEs has its own problems and you need to help them understand what you do in their own terms. I am writing an article which will help us understand it.

[wanderingmind]

I think that 80:20 rule and its application depends on what kind of site you have, and what your short term and long term ebjectives are.

In my main site, probably for me its 95:5; doesn't mean it would work for everyone.

Depending on the kind of site (corporate, short term, event specific, portal, news and features, directory, MFA, sale-oriented et al) that can go any way I suppose.

[cleanup]

I'd love to spend 80% of my time on the site., but as a one-man-band living in a very competitive niche my ratio is the other way around 80%SEO work and 20%(or less) site building.

This is since big daddy by the way, before that I used to spend more than 80% of my time creating content, and enjoyed it...

[AjiNIMC]

IMHO Search engine updates should not change your strategy rather you should change their strategy.

[jomaxx]

I certainly don't waste anything like 20% of my time tweaking my sites for Google and watching the datacenters twitch.

If you wanted to broaden that out to include all marketing efforts, then I might tend to agree, but there are lots of ways to skin a cat and IMO this still wouldn't approach the level of being a rule.

[wanderingmind]

How do we change their strategy?

[AjiNIMC]

How do we change their strategy?

Thats a good question, Let Google put more money and research than me to make me #1 in their search engine. Let me put money on making it really the #1 for customer.

Now the biggest problem is wait. It is just like the real world, you being saint and gaining success and you not being bad and gaining success are two different things. Later works and former doesn't in short term.

[wanderingmind]

By the time google recognises any need to change their behavior (if at all they ever do), a lot of us would have bitten the dust :)

[AjiNIMC]

Once google understands the problem you will come back. Coming back to SERP is a better feeling than going down forever.

Google with people like Matt is in touch with a lot of webmasters. I think this interface is helping them improve Google. Out of this 20% of the time we can surely read Matt's blog and add our opinion to it.