When Optimizing A Site For SEO, Content Is The Only Thing That Matters
Many times when I talk to people about optimizing a site for their business, they want to ask me all kinds of questions on my thoughts about an analytics program, tricks for building links, shortcuts to getting indexed, or a slew of other questions that might deal with table-less CSS design.
Wanna know what I really think about it? It’s mainly garbage.
Sure analytics has it place to determine the progress of your campaign and building links is a ‘must have’ chore for getting traffic to your site, but the number one thing you can do is write/have great content. When I speak about content, I am also lumping in your keywords as well as they will be apart of the overall content of your site.
If you have great content ( written for users, optimized for search engines ) that people want to read and enjoy, they will naturally link to you through their site ( a blog, a commercial site, a directory they own, a bookmark, a column in a online newspaper, etc… ) and thus will help eliminate having to build links yourself back to your site. If they don’t have a site of their own, they very well may refer people to your site or become a customer themselves of your services/products.
With all these links coming to you, you will naturally gain trust and authority which will help get you indexed almost daily ( if you are pushing out new great content that fast ) and get your content in the search engines faster for even more people to find.
As you are pushing out new content and getting new visitors from all these links, your stats are for sure going to go up. As long as you are building content people want to read, it is almost unnecessary to log into your stats program for what most common people look at. If you are not looking into logs and checking more advanced features like visitor path analysis and time spent on page/site, then it is almost worthless to check your stats for just ‘hits’ or ‘visitors’ as these will naturally have gone up anyways from all your great content.
When it comes to design, layout and testing are important.. however, you do not need to have a full ‘CSS only’ layout to gain ranking in search engines. As a matter of fact, I mix CSS with tables and have even ranked full table layout sites to the front page of Google for some very competitive terms, outranking sites with full CSS layouts.
Once you gain authority and trust in the search engines, you can pretty much rank well for tons of terms and phrases as you expand your site. You will also get indexed faster and show up quicker for those new terms and phrases, thus driving more and more traffic to your site faster than before.
Content is the cornerstone of optimizing a web site. Without content you have nothing to show your visitors. If you have content and it is boring and generally ‘plain’, then no body is going to stick around and link to you. Make the most of your content and watch the links role in for free. Within time the trust and authority will settle in and so will sales and leads.