SEO Intricacies vs. Business Development vs Chickens
Basic search engine optimization (SEO) includes such things as insertion of meta-tag, keywords, and titles in the home page and obtaining one-way links for the website in general is a must when it comes to building a website. But SEO also includes a variety of nebulous intricacies such as search-engine friendly URLs. Like I said, when it comes to SEO, basic SEO is mandatory for anyone building a website, but does finessing the intricacies and fine-tuning the site, so that each page has SEF URLs bring high search results, or does proper business development bring site popularity, one-way-links, etc., all of which are aspects of SEO, which in turn brings high search-page results?
The question is analogous to the chicken and the egg puzzle, and if the chicken is SEO and if the egg is a well-developed and promoted business, I have to side with the case that the egg came first: proper business development is the key to high search results, and a variety of intricate SEO techniques such as user-friendly URLs are probably not needed.
For instance, everyone knows about Amazon.com. Amazon engages in ongoing online and real-world marketing campaignsit has about three ka-billion one-ways links going to its siteand their content updates on a seemingly minute-by-minute basis. They are doing all the things a successful website should do. Furthermore, the only search engine friendly link they seem to have is their home page:
http://www.amazon.com
A link to a very popular Harry Potter Link, which as you probably know is part of a name brand that fairly well. If someone who is overly concerned about SEF URLs, he or she might spend a lot of time fixing buried pages to a brand name product they want to sell, but if the website owner markets the site properly, and if he or she markets the product properly, the result will be increased site visibility, increased product awareness, and, we all hope, increased sales. Because of the online and real-world marketing in which this hypothetical business owner would have engage, the website would receive increased visits to the site, increased links to the product via such things as blog reviews, and when it's all over, a search engine page rank.
Amazon's link to a current Harry Potter book is ...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/054506967X/ref=a mb_link_6900362_1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=righ t-1&pf_rd_r=1V7EGD1S49GR1EQKS8M8&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p =400143001&pf_rd_i=283155
Is the above link search-engine friendly? Not quite.
Web owners sometimes get caught in the trap of building "the perfect" site rather than making money. Once the site is designed, functional, and approvedcomplete with the basics, (which includes basic SEO) forget it. Focus instead on marketing and building landing pages (all of which should have basic SEO), focus instead on perfecting landing page copy geared toward increasing sales. Do not focus on perfecting the website. Do not focus on perfecting nitty-gritty details such as creating SEF URLs for buried webpages.
Why?
Because an e-commerce site is a commercial business, and most of the sales will come from real-world and online marketing activities such as:
a) Networking / word of mouth
b) printed news articles & press releases that reference this new service
c) blog reviews: which provide good reviews (hopefully) and one-way links
d) Networking via online communities.
If someone sets up a Harry Potter website and seeks to sell Harry Potter merchandise, they are going to have to deal with site's such as Amazon who has already done the above four steps and more enough so that nearly a trillion of unfriendly looking URLs hog the top ranks of the search engine page results.
In short: Is SEO needed? Absolutely. Is being too finicky about each and every SEO detail necessary? Not quite. But build the business not the website. Building the business will take care of the website.
In regards to the chicken and the egg: in distant time, long, long ago, something that was not quite a chicken DNA-wise mutated ever-so-slightly and laid an egg. What grew within this egg, and what finally hatched was the first chicken. So this egg, which held this first chicken was similarly the first chicken egg even though it originated from a creature that was almost a chickenbut not quite.