What IS the point?

Well this is an interesting question.  Recently a co-SEO expert had said that “There is no real white hat SEO” and followed it with “it is all webmasters trying to manipulate search-engine results.”  To this statement I felt compelled to argue, it’s not the manipulation but just the desire to be in the standings.  Well both points can be argued and supported, but the reality is that you need to have SEO in order to have any search engine results. 

In a perfect world, or as the search engines would prefer, you web site would be ranked according to it’s relevance on its own, no SEO needed.  But the reality is that with everyone doing SEO, well everyone needs to do it, or you’re going to get lost in the shuffle.  We have got to play the game… because the game is already being played. 

The point we should be making is based on the website or your website's goals and business plan.  (A business plan for a web site?)  Well if your website is out there –it should have a point- a plan – and a strategy for getting your point or website doing what you need it to.  ) 

Think of SEO as advertising your website to the search engines.  This by the way -- is the point.  Getting search engines to recognize your value and ensure you get the value assigned to your site.  Which brings us to why do you want to be in the search engine results?  Well the number vary depending on the source and what you are looking for, but on average 40% of all people searching the web use Google, 20% yahoo, 20% MSN, and the other 20% “other”. 

Let’s talk about “organic” vs. “paid” traffic.  Organic traffic is web visitors that come to your site through a search engine, a link from another site, or typing your website name into the address bar.  The majority of site traffic is from search engines.  Paid traffic is well paid; you pay for an advertisement on other sites that bring visitors to your site.  Guess where most of the paid advertising traffic come from- Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Engine Marketing!

  The paid results are listed next to the organic results.  If I have lost you go to www.google.com, type in ‘SEO’.  When you look at the results the organic traffic is listed on the left, the paid listing are on the right.  Also – Google and Yahoo have a network of individual sites that run the ads on their sites. 

I will get into more detail on this at another time.  Basically most new sites use paid advertising to make up for the lack of results in the organic search engines. Even with a kick butt search engine advertising team it takes time, at least 2-3 months, more realistically much  longer to get up in the engines.  Again this depends on your market or niche. 

If your site requires sales NOW, you pretty much are going to be stuck with a hefty advertising budget, if you can wait for the organic traffic to kick off sales or interest in your site then you can save yourself the advertising budget.  In the long run – monies put towards the organic traffic of your web site are much more cost effective and typically generate a much lower cost per lead.