What #SEO really means to bloggers – So Effing Overrated

This is an open invitation for all of the SEO evangelists to come and purge the anti-SEO sentiment from deep within my soul. What’s the worst that could happen? It may turn out that I’m wrong, which happens up to twice a week, so I can live with that. What I have trouble living with is all the articles, tweets, and posts that claim Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is the holy grail of blogging. I don’t know about you, but I’ve already accepted the fact that I’m not going to bump Mashable, Social Media Today, or Alltop from the top results when someone searches for Social Media on Google. While SEO isn’t completely useless, it’s SO OVERRATED for most bloggers

PEOPLE TRUMP KEYWORDS

I’ll admit that if your website sells products or services, SEO would play a more important role in getting noticed. But what about blogs? Are people really starting their Social Media or Marketing blogs with the expectation that SEO will magically deliver millions of hits and put them on the first page on Google? Get Real, it’s a pipe dream, unless you have tens of thousands of dollars to invest. Even then, there’s no guarantee that you’ll reach the promised land. Maybe it’s worth considering when you’ve already become established with hundreds of thousands of visitors, but don’t buy into the hype before then.  Instead, find a better(and less costly) way to grow your community.

Here are a few suggestions:

Spend time creating meaningful relationships with other bloggers

Focus on adding value to other successful blogs by becoming a part of their community

Find a niche market and build credibility through your content

Get to know your audience – go beyond saying “thank you for commenting”

DARTH SEO vs LUKE SKYGOOGLE?

Last time I checked, the purpose of SEO is to optimize your website in order to rank higher on search engines. Sounds innocent enough on the surface, but when you dig deeper into the technicalities of SEO, it gets creepy. Who wants to deal with the likes of robots, spiders, and crawlers…be tempted to engage in cloaking or spamdexing… and be able to differentiate between white hats and black hats? No, stop, I know what you’re thinking – this is not the description of a Star Wars Movie. There is no Darth SEO that fights Luke Skygoogle in an epic battle of good vs evil. If that were the case, SEO would be easier because at least you could tell good from bad. In the SEO saga, the line between is fuzzy, at best.

There I said it – I’m more concerned about building the so G community from the ground up with quality people, rather than rely on search traffic, backlinks, and 5 second page visits for cool stats. Let the outcry begin, am I completely off base here? Am I missing the boat or do you agree? Lastly, do me a favor and include a link to your twitter profile if I don’t follow you already.