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Is SEO worth the trouble?

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superboyac:
SEO has become one of those words that are thrown around a lot these days as if people know what it means, but frankly, what is it?  It sounds like a bunch of BS to me.  I mean, I get it...search engine optimization.  That's a nice term and all, but how does it work?  Whenever I come across terms or ideas like this (especially in a corporate sense) my BS radar starts going off, and I'm usually right.  For example, when you go to a enterprise software website and there's a bunch of vague descriptions, but no screenshots and no price that's easy to find, that's the same kind of thing.  They want you to call them to send a salesman to your company.
I think SEO is the same thing.  No?  How do you optimize your website?  If you are using a Wordpress site, all the code is setup already.  It's not like a guy like me is going to change wordpress code.  So then what?  There are themes that are "SEO friendly"...yet another term that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.  I've seen the theme code.  It's nice and clean.  Does that mean it's SEO friendly?  I don't know.  So then I think maybe SEO has to do with strategically worded paragraphs in your content?  Or banners and ads that make you more attractive to google?  What does SEO actually mean, without the corporate jargon?!

And here's what I don't understand.  If I don't "get" something, I'll avoid it completely.  So when I started my website, I didn't want to deal with SEO, so I didn't do anything.  So I didn't do anything special for SEO, and I didn't put any banners or ads or anything like that either.  I don't make a cent on it.  But even with all that said, my engineering articles got relatively popular in the engineering community, and now if you do certain searches, my website is at the top of the list.  Sometimes, it's first before the website of the actual authors of the books I mention, which I find interesting.  So my website climbed up to the top without me having to do SEO or ads or anything.  So what does SEO actually do for me?  I don't get it.  To me it kind of confirms that content really is king, but I'm not convinced quite yet.

40hz:
Content is king.

But when in doubt, hedge your bets by going with something that is SEO friendly right out of the box. No point in getting dropped in rank or blacklisted just because you inadvertantly did something to piss off a web spider.

Rule of thumb: Don't reinvent the wheel until/unless you have to. When in doubt, go with Wordpress or a modern CMS for a biz site until you get things sorted out.

Stripped of jargon, SEO basically means setting up your website so that it's as easy as possible for a search engine to index it completely and accurately without raising any warning flags as to it's overall legitimacy. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details - and that's where it gets hairy enough that an entire sub-industry has grown up to deal with it.

:)

steeladept:
I am the first to say I do NOT speak from experience.  It is strictly from what I read on the subject when looking into it myself.  That said, my knowledge of the subject suggests you are asking 2 different questions.  1) What is SEO - what does it do?  2) What does it do for me.  I will answer your second question first, because it is easier - in your particular case, not much.  Content has already let your articles rise to the top and you are getting hits for them without any shenanigans associated with websites and SEO these days.

Now for question 1 - SEO uses metatags and other techniques to make your web page more friendly to the crawlers that Search companies employ to categorize and list sites in the first place.  It allows you to "target" your audience and provides more concise information to index so that searches for specific topics will target your articles over articles that are not as specific.  Here, specific is measured (in part) by the number of non-trivial matching terms are present in the code and/or content of the page.  It is then augmented by the number of hits the page has that conforms to a signature that implies it was useful to the consumer - as compared to one they just click through or click back - as well as how often the page is updated.  There is actually quite a lot that goes into the mix to determine page rankings and these features and the math behind it are proprietary business secrets of the search company, but those are some of the most common metrics.  In your case, a combination of no other (or very few other) articles related to the search, combined with regular updates, and clean code as well as longevity (which plays into how many times your site is crawled and new content is found), work together to place you at or near the top of all searches without any special SEO.  In other words, your regular work is actually hitting several SEO metrics naturally and that is helping get you to the top without extra SEO operations.

At least that is my take.  Anyone who really knows what is going on...:P

mahesh2k:
What does SEO actually mean, without the corporate jargon?!
--- End quote ---

Search engine optimization means you're making your content noticeable to search engine by following search queries (keywords optimization), relevant content(to the keyword), high quality(no spun or robot content,spam). SEO is done to site in order to let it go higher in the search engine results.

Is SEO worth the trouble?
--- End quote ---


Yes and NO.

For YES - If you want to make money online (and don't want to listen to crap of your boss) then do whatever SEO methods out there to make money. It's against ethics and character stuff but things do pay off. To be honest Superboy, i'm against black hat SEO and i'm starving to make money, whereas any newbie kid who learns B-SEO (black hat) after me is making hundreds of dollars. So it's upto you to judge what's right and wrong in SEO.

For No - You're adding a lot of junk and garbage, rehash content on the web if you choose black hat SEO. You're not adding any value to user search queries and their time.

Few things to clarify - Meta-tags are dead and are ignored by almost every modern SE. Links from relevant sites matters a lot in order to take you at higher position in SERPs. Keep quoting(quotes tag) to limited amount.

Okay, keeping the rant aside. My suggestions are - install wordpress, get a good theme like thesis, genesis or headway which are SEO optimized (on-page SEO) with tags and ability to dofollow and nofollow links in themes. If you're on white-hat SEO side then just use a good SEO optimized theme and forget about rest of the SEO stuff, just write natural content with keywords as you go. If you're not in this for money then don't bother about SEO. Just care about traffic, feedback and social media which you can do with on-page SE optimized themes, twitter, Facebook widgets. Your content will be noticed by search engine with social signals or backlinks factor.

app103:
You might want to take a look at my article How can you rank well on search engines, without fussing with SEO?

This has been my approach to SEO for awhile, and I have had no problems with it. My ebook directory is the top result in Google for the keywords "programming ebooks" and has been for a number of years, despite site design changes, domain name changes, and being a victim of content theft (a lot of people with high PR blogs copied the original one page site and shoved it into a single blog post, never even bothering to link back to me as the source of their info).

I also do not have problems with any of my other sites when I follow my own rules.

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