What’s SEO Got to Do With It?

A few years back we built a website to promote some healthcare products to sell online.  We were working with a company that was teaching us how to do all this website building stuff, and a big chunk of it had to do with SEO (that’s search engine optimization for you newcomers).  And you know, we had a darn good-looking website (being totally unbiased of course).  Then we kicked back and waited for the sales to start rolling in. 

Nothing; not one single solitary sale!

So, all that work to get SEO’d and nothing, which begs the question; “What’s SEO got to do with anything?”  Despite all the hype about it, SEO doesn’t have as much to do with getting traffic to your site as you might think.  To be sure, I’ve seen some sites that the authors obviously spent a lot of time with SEO, but their copy was very redundant and could put an insomniac to sleep.

If you’re spending a lot of time trying to improve your ranking with the search engines hoping it will send traffic beating a path to your proverbial cyber door, you could be in for quite a wait.   Besides, when you do get people to your site, you want them to get excited about what you have to offer, not put them to sleep (unless you selling mattresses and the like).

So what’s a body to do? 

You could spend a lot of money and hire a designer to really tweak your website; or you could spend a lot of time learning how to do all this SEO stuff really well and still try to keep you copy exciting and interesting.  My suggestion would be to focus your time on learning other traffic producing techniques such as writing articles (like this one), doing blogs, getting into public forums and chat rooms (all this won’t cost you any money), developing lists for e-mail campaigns (very little money), or doing a google adword campaign (this COULD blow out your wallet if your not careful).  

All of these are pro-active ways of going after your customers and prospects instead of being reactive waiting for them to come to you via the search engines.  Keep SEO in the back of your mind and do the best you can with it.  However, don’t wait for traffic to wander by, become a traffic cop and start directing that traffic to your site.