7 Reasons Why You Do Need SEO

John of EggRage, got it wrong on this one. He wrote a blog post titled “7 Reasons Why You Don’t Need SEO“. Well, I am responding because he is sending out the wrong message. SEO is indeed needed and without it the web would be an ugly place. I do take the stance that you should not settle at any cost for SEO. I see it like this, if you plan to spend $200 for SEO, then seriously you can save your money and just do the SEO task yourself – at least then next time you try to find an SEO you’ll know they are worth more than $200. The title of John’s post should have been titled “7 Reasons Why You Don’t Need Crappy SEO”, then that would have reflected the real.

Well, I am going to play devil’s advocate and respond to John questions from a SEO perspective. Here is me … giving you “7 Reasons Why You Do Need SEO”

1. You don’t need ‘link building’, you need great content which people want to link to all by themselves.

Stop creating spam (you know what I’m talking about!) and add to your site with some decent relevant content. Do you honesty think that top ranking sites do so well because they spam links everywhere? Think about that.

Link building will always be needed as long as search engines equate a great portion of external links into their algorithmic equation. If you don’t create links how do you expect the search engines to calculate your true web presence? I actually think it is smart for someone to strategically and practically create links on the web – tracking and managing your link placements is responsible and intelligent marketing.

However, I do recognize that I found this same article on a link referral because of great content creation – so it contradicts my position on this issue, but that goes to show that I do not neglect the importance of on page optimization and great content, but even still you cannot deny the same importance of managed artificial link building … this includes press release syndication, article distribution, social media marketing, etc. Even the big companies use these methods of link building and branding.

2. You don’t need ‘content optimisation’, you need a great writer for all your site’s copy. (a copy writer)

So a user finds your site because your page copy is full of bold keywords, then what? I’ll tell you then what, your bounce rate goes through the roof is what - what’s the use of ranking highly if no one wants to read your spammy content? Write for users not for search engines and chances are that you’ll get linked to (see above) and your content will still be relevant to search engines!

I’ve actually been to plenty of sites with bold content on the page and instead it caught my attention allowed me to easily scan and browse the page for buzz words. You even used bold text to make it easier for readers. And yes, you do need a copywriter to WRITE for humans, but you also need a SEO to OPTIMIZE for search engines. You are not maximizing your website potential if you completely write for humans, you can lose out on high volume keyword targets.

However to be fair on this point … I would say that you are right YOU don’t need an SEO, but you better make sure your copywriter has one!

3. You don’t need ‘viral content creation’, you need a head of marketing who’s read Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’

For anyone who hasn’t read Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’ - Go any buy it, it’ll change your entire outlook on running a website and any business. For anyone who’s already read it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Never read ‘Purple Cow’, but I did read SEO Book.

For anyone who hasn’t read Aaron Wall’s ‘SEO Book’ - Go any buy it, it’ll change your entire outlook on building links and SEO. For anyone who’s already read it, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

4. You don’t need ‘internal link analysis’, you need a web designer who codes your navigation right the first time.

You shouldn’t need to pay someone to convert your navigation from javascript to html and css… you should have it done right the first time! and if it’s not done right, get your developer to go back and damn well fix it!

With the constant changes of your website you have to keep it fine tuned. You have to perform routine SEO maintenance. With search engines constantly changing you need cutting edge SEO. You can share the value of pages by internal linking, you can control the flow of link juice by using the nofollow attribute, and you can increase your search ranking using optimized internal linking.

5. You don’t need ’server side rewrites for keyword optimisation’, you need a web developer who knows his stuff and understand what will work best for the end user.

Again, server side rewrites are pretty standard these days, they should be implemented up-front during the site build. Not afterwards at double the price by some snooty SEO company who claim to be greater than the earth itself and God’s gift to Google.

You right! Rewrites should be implemented up-front during the site build – if this was the perfect world, but it’s not. That’s why you need SEO to clean up the developers mess.

6. You don’t need ‘alt attribute and header tag implementation’, you need a web designer who codes semantic markup and adheres to modern web standards.

This is such an easy one! You don’t actually even need a web designer (though it helps) you can pretty easily go through an site an add alt attributes to the images, once again, it isn’t specialist work - don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!

Ummm! Not really. You need an SEO. You need someone who is going to maximize your ranking potential by researching and analyzing keywords. There shouldn’t be any guesswork or non-research when it comes to keywords. Each page should be unique with its own set of keyword targets and adheres to Google Webmaster Guidelines.

7. You don’t need ‘landing pages’, you need enough content on all your existing pages to talk about all the different aspects of your industry.

Anyone who tell’s you that you need ‘landing pages’ is talking nonsense - what you need is an in depth website with lots of content! How? Start a blog! Write on it every day and you’ll soon have lots of fresh content for search engines to crawl.. trust me, it’s easy.

Either way it’s still a landing page! Trust me!

SEO is definitely a needed service, there is an evident market for it — everyone wants to get to the top. You can’t expect your developer to do it all (or know it all). SEO is something that continues well after your website has been developed — far down the road when your developer is a distant memory.

SPHINN IT!