Web Dev Notes

I read an interesting article the other day titled “SEO or Content - Can There be Only One?” over at blognewswatch.com. I particularly enjoyed The Lazy SEO Manifesto which is both discouraging and encouraging depending on your point of view. SEO can be a great “get rich quick” tool, but without content, it’s like throwing magnets at a wall instead of a fridge, none of the traffic will stick.

The way I see it is quite simple. Quality content builds loyalty, quality SEO builds traffic. Content will allow your site to be successful in the long run, whereas SEO can bring you short term prosperity. Combining both SEO and content is the key to allowing your website to reach its full potential.

The reason we bookmark websites is because we have identified quality content. We would not need bookmarks if exactly what we wanted to see would show up every time we conducted a search. This leads to a major problem. Sometimes, what we are looking for is hidden in the depths of the internet because other sites with poor or equivalent content have used SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to gain higher rankings in search results. Millions of searches are conducted every week, so there is no doubt that higher rankings translate to higher traffic.

This website is a perfect example of SEO at work. While I hope to be offering quality content, there is no real reason why I should have a page rank of 5 and receive thousands of page views a week, after only my second week of writing this blog. Thanks to the 451press network of websites, each member benefits from the success of the other through extensive linking. In fact, I’ve noticed i’ve been getting traffic from search engines from people searching for “Alt-Tab Replacement” due to this article I wrote just last week! If I had posted the 100% exact same post on my Flogger blog, the post would remain, as previously mentioned, hidden in the depths of the internet.

While good SEO can lead to almost immediate success, you cannot expect your website to be viable for long without quality content. Building visitor loyalty is extremely important, because search engines are constantly working on ways to provide better results for searches conducted with their engine. As a result, if you rely solely on SEO, within a single day your website could potentially drop from thousands of visitors to virtually none should a search engine like Google make changes that cause your website to receive a lower page rank.

The best thing you can do is focus on content first. Next, build up good relationships with other websites similar to your own so that you can get quality incoming links. This will help build a solid foundation for your website such that it can survive regardless of whatever search engines are up to. If time remains, then try to do some SEO to increase traffic to your website. Don’t waste time on SEO until you have something to offer. In fact, you may actually harm your site if visitors are lured in and find nothing useful because in the future, once you have content, they may skip clicking your link if they still remember wasting their time the last time they visited it!