Smashing Magazine, a very popular website for professional web designers and developers, wrote an article bursting the SEO bubble and shed some light on the importance of writing quality content aimed at users, not search engines.
Their message can be boiled down to the following points:
- Website owners are unhealthily obsessed with their rankings on Google.
- We should be creating primarily for people and not search engines.
- The best way to improve your ranking is to produce great content that people link to.
- That great content is better produced in-house, rather than being outsourced to an agency.
- A good web designer can take you a long way in making your site accessible to search engines.
- Before you spend money on an SEO company, make sure you have the basics in place first.
Here are some notable excerpts from the article:
Google’s aim is simple: connect its searchers with the most relevant content. If you are more worried about a good ranking than providing relevant content, then you are going to be fighting a losing battle…
…The SEO company can use every trick in the book to get you better rankings, but over the long term they will lose, because Google is constantly changing how it rates websites so it can provide more accurate results.
Remember, you shouldn’t be optimizing for ranking in search engines, you should be optimizing for users…
…it all comes down to content. If you create great content, people will link to it, and Google will improve your placement. It really is that simple.
The question then becomes, how do you create great content?…
Click here to read the full article on their website.
What’s your opinion on all this? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below.
