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If you speak to all the best Internet Marketing Pros they tell you SEO is a waste of time longterm, everyone in the industry has lost their position at somepoint from what I gather - or am I wrong?
I want to hear from anyone who has had long term success with SEO say for 6 months or longer....
Is Google SEO a waste of time longterm?
Yep, for the most part it is. Build your site for people not SE. Add good basic HTML linked content pages each day. Exchange links with on-topic sites and don't even look at their PR.
It really is that simple.
"internet marketing" is actually what most people in here are doing these days imho. Attention to how google works is one aspect of this and in that aspect its certainly very right to remove obstacles for spiders to be sure that search engines can see what is on your sites.
Many organisations, that care to positively communicate, use a combination of serps and ppc to try to get their messages across.
To obtain more than random serps costs money, just as the use of ppc costs money, just as developing relevant compelling site contents also has costs.
To suggest google seo is a waste of time you would have to first define what is "google seo"?
If it is to "concentrate on making pages that rank well in google for specific targets terms" then no its not a complete waste of time but, as the current state of the florida update shows, sensitivity to keeping very aware of the possible changes in the rules is vital if your contents are to be found at all.
If you inadvertantly break the rules for google your site may not be found, just as if you on purpose over emphasise a promotion method and google decides to penalise that your site may also not be found.
It is my opinion that working to avoid being penalised by google is just as much "google seo" as working to get top spot for a competitive keyword.
I know plenty of companies who are the real world authority on a particular subject having higher engineering spends on that subject more customers, greater market share, larger profitability, better product ranges etc etc yet because they do not care to have sites which are even remotely compatible with google or their contents remotely relevant compared to the information needs interested parties exhibit in their search patterns, they *never* appear in google serps, the only exception being for searches on their specific company name.
If its ok for them its ok for me :-).
One possible reason for making a site is to provide information to people who are seeking it, to provide solutions if you like. If many web site builders were not globally trying to do that google would have a harder time to make an index of any value. And in fact as mentioned above many many sites do not take this into account at all. google will not in my opinion ever be able to organise these others into any valuable ranking even with the assistance of the likes of dmoz because many of them are not even motivated to comply with dmoz rules :-)
If one of your aims is to provide relevant results to information seekers who use search engines then it is of interest to you to try to be ranked in google to get relevant traffic. The same applies to yahoo, msn, ink av etc etc
So if you found while researching the interest and market for your information and message that people are looking 1,000 times a week for " blue widget * " and only 10 times a week for " widget blue * " then it would make some sense to at least include the terms both ways round on the relevant pages. that would possibly be considered "google seo" and yes it is still very much worth doing.
So imho yes you want to be making good contents and sites for your target user base but also
- contents and sites which are as compatible with google's requirements as possible, i.e. not flash or "text as image" or movie and
- users requirements vis a vi easy to navigate / find the pages of real contents in the site and
- compatible with the words and phrases that searchers are using to look for the information that you are providing.
When competitors are able to trounce you in serps with highly visible and misleading tactics it often becomes tempting to respond in kind. Thats where the risks arise that you may risk a penalty.
so "Is Google SEO a waste of time longterm?"
No imho its not a waste of time at all, depending on your outlook it can be very important that your site(s) remain as compatible as possible with googles "terms of service".
As these on occasion change, your sites may also have to change.
It is interesting to me that the most well funded sites with these objectives often stay on top no matter what the algo changes are because they have effectively done "everything that is good" to a very large extent so if the balance is changed from month to another they remain on top, amongst the rest whose budgets are more limited is where the finer judgements have to be made.
In the "objective to provide relevant results to searchers" google and responsible and interested webmasters should be working together as much as possible.
Why one might ask has google made available as many tools as they have to understand how their google works unless they want us to work in some kind of standardised way to help them deliver relevant results to their users.
If we play ball it helps both of us, if we dont then they will not be able to deliver relevant results at all, because we would all be doing completely different things on our sites.
Main difference is that it takes about 2 months to get one listing on Dmoz, however we take about 2 months to build a good quality site that Googlebot and all the other spiders can pick up. And yes we all contribute to a better Google database.
It is obviously not a waste of time if Google SEO means building great content site for humans, that is linking up to a mininet of links in relation to the subject, and making a site search engine friendly with a level of detail on the do's and don'ts.
So my conclusion is being formed and SEO is just like anything else out there - humans can get it wrong, equipement can go wrong, software can go wrong, things can change etc. But if you do 'Google SEO' and any other type of 'SEO' work then you should be covered by (most) problems, if like me you get unlucky and it effects you for 1 month - you sit back wait, (build more pages until next update) and carry on with the programe.
Conclusion - IS Google SEO a waste of time longterm - No if you optimise for humans, understand the do's and don'ts, can be reactive, have good coding skills, and most of all have common sense.
Even Cisco Systems have network problems and believe it or not have had Global network issues in the last 5 years - if a problem happens at the time of a roling index update and you have been unlucky you will suffer for about 1 month but as long as you don't break the rules you should be ok longterm.
The figures are from a cookie-based tracking program. They show the original entry point across all visits in this period - if your first visit in this period was from a SE, all your later visits will be contributed to this SE. So, where do the users really come from?
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Period: Monday, September 01, 2003 to Wednesday, November 12, 2003
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All SE's grand total: 54% (Google share: 65%)
- Google: 35%
- Yahoo: 6%
- MSN: 4%
Type in address bar or use bookmarks: 33%
Links (*) grand total: 13%
-------------------------------------------------------------------Approximately 1/3 of visitors originated from Google (various tld's). That's a lot, so of course Google is important to me, but it's very far from the 80% i've seen mentioned elsewhere. Oh, and links give traffic, i might add.
Almost 50% comes directly to the site. If Google dissapeared tomorrow (very unlikely) that site would still live happily. Of course i don't mind new people visiting, so i put in some effort to make the site good for the SE's as well. The SE's, in turn, don't mind having a site in their index that people like to use.
Taken to the extreme, these figures illustrate my point:
If you build a site serving some specific user needs, and you do that really well, then - at some point - you will become more-or-less independent of any specific SE. Nevertheless, it seems that when you reach that point you tend to do really well in the SE's also.
/claus
[edited by: claus at 9:24 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
Have not done the maths on the % Google has overal, if SE's account for 50% traffic then your obviously doing something very well - following all the good advice regarding SEO.
Good proper SEO = Internet Optimisation :-)j
SEO sounds better!
If you believe, as I do, that there can never a finite amount of visitors that visit your site, then you'll see that SE's will always have a place. There will always be 'NEW' people searching out 'NEW' things. This is a "cycle" that I believe to be nearly limitless and infinite. I believe many others share this view as well because of the long term outlook on Google from a investing standpoint.
However, Google might not be the king two, three years down the line - which is why i am on the fence as to whether or not 'Google SEO' is a "waste of time" or not. Simply put; Don't put yourself in a position to "live or die" in regards to top rankings in Google.
All SE's grand total: 54% (Google share: 65%)
- Google: 35%
- Yahoo: 6%
- MSN: 4%
Type in address bar or use bookmarks: 33%
Links (*) grand total: 13%
I think this stats shows that out of 100 visitors to your site, 54 are through a SE, 35 are through address bar. This explains the place of search engine and google too.
Aji
I've found, that a skilled Web Designer who is good at SEO and builds it into the design of the site instead of hiring a SEO company to do it after the site is built who does not specialize in site design, seems to be able to create sites that can withstand Google over the longer haul.
"Google SEO (as SEO for any other search engine) comes automagically if you do the right things.If 'automagically' is a typo it is still applicable, maybe even moreso. However, I must disagree. I find that now I have to work (SEO) to make my backlink structure natural. I'll have to try and get more links with anchor that is not my site's title. I have reworked the internal links so that they say 'Home', instead of my site's title. I have removed alt text from my logo linking back to the home page because I am worried. So what if it doesn't validate anymore. So what if disabled viewers are now unable to know my logo is my logo. SEO used to be about making your site spiderable, and making sure the links pointing to your page accurately described what was on the page. Natural. Now it is anything but. SEO has suddenly become about not pissing off Google. And that has become a moving target.
SEO has suddenly become about not pissing off Google. And that has become a moving target.
If you are good at what you do -- the world shines bright and more often than not - you're on top. This has nothing really to do with Google (other than Google being the messenger).
The game itself is never over as there is always one more thing you can do to get (or stay) visible.
Admittedly, it was SEO that ultimately saved a major investment -- not because they're now at the top of some list (search results) but because humans are creatures of habit and Google knows this and lives by it.
So do I! ;)
I have reworked the internal links so that they say 'Home', instead of my site's title.
If you are good at what you do -- the world shines bright and more often than not - you're on top.I am good at what i do. i have been on the top far longer than I have been AWOL. The rest of my pages are still on top. My main competition, which does no seo, but happens to have a similar title which people use as link text, is also gone. Almost all the relevant sites are gone. The pages with high pr and one outbound link with the search phrase in it are the ones showing up on the first page. And this has gotten much worse today than it was previously in the update.
