Why SEO isn’t all its cracked up to be Jun 15th '10

SEO, the three letter acronym which often has a bad reputation. Peoples first impression of SEO is some random company phoning up trying to “guarantee 1st on Google”. SEO can be brilliant for your website, however its not the be all or end all of website promotion. There are more powerful tools and methods you can use at a fraction of the cost.

What is SEO

SEO, for people who aren’t aware, stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is the process to improve your website’s ranking in the search engines which will ultimately give you more sales. The bad reputation that SEO has, comes from the fact that no-one can guarantee any position on Google using SEO. This combined with the fact that often you have to invest thousands of pounds before you see any sort of result. To the business minded people, this is ridiculous and too much of a risk.

For the companies that do invest in SEO, the results can be great, if completed correctly. However many many (many!) times I have spoken with companies who have had their fingers burnt with SEO in the past.

So what are the alternatives?

Alternatives to SEO

Let me get this clear now, this post hasn’t been created to give you a list of all possible alternatives to SEO, it is to make you aware that there are alternatives out there which can be more effective, depending on your industry. A few examples of these are:

• Social Media
• Blogging

With both of the examples above, the search engines come to you. A friend of mine, The Internet Marketing Guy mentioned this to me about a year ago and it really hit home. The point being, don’t chase after the search engines, make them chase after you.

Both of the methods above have one thing in common, quality content. Get the content right and the rest will follow (within reason!).

“I’ve heard good things about video, is this good for promotion?”

Video is a fairly hot topic at the moment as it is seen as an alternative to SEO when promoting your website. Currently search engines can’t read the content of the videos themselves so how are videos good for promotion? The primary reason being that videos are more likely to be linked to than text or pictures. The more links to a particular page the more inbound links the search engine sees and thus a higher search ranking.

In conclusion

If you are already using SEO with your website and you are getting great results, brilliant! This post isn’t to put you off doing traditional SEO. Just be aware that there are alternatives out there which, depending on your industry, work just as well, if not better.

Got any added tips that I have missed and you think are useful when promoting your website?

Written by Oliver Culverhouse

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