by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: June 19, 2009   Last Updated: July 31, 2009

SEO is currently one of the most talked about website marketing tools, along with social media and the traditional paid advertising. Sometimes it looks like it's the magic wand of success, that will make your company earn millions and expand globally. But is that so?

The harsh reality is that SEO for the sake of SEO isn't going to help you get your users to fulfill the goals you have set for your site. Yes, a keyword stuffed article with a fancy web address will surely draw eyeballs to your site... that will leave promptly and probably never visit again since your site didn't do anything for them. And, at the end of the day, conversions are more important than quick visits, since conversions is where the money is.

That said, SEO isn't at all negative for your site, but it can distract you from the main focus which is providing your visitors with whatever they are looking for, making your website full of useful and engaging content and relevant calls to action that will make them recommend you, come back frequently and purchase from you.

Search engine optimization relies heavily on building link relationships with other sites, that are, in the best case, related to your site content and will send good quality traffic. Does that mean that you should get your site linked from everywhere just to increase your page rank? Not at all. You need to invest your efforts on building links wisely, on places that will send the right kind of traffic to your site, and make sure that your site makes people want to link to your contents.

Another important thing to take into account is accessibility. Your site markup (HTML) should follow the standards, and using CSS to signal how it should be displayed will allow users with visual difficulties to reach the content through their specialized browsers (be it a text-to-voice one or just different style sheets adapted to some visual defects). Take for example user friendly URLs. They are in the form www.mysite.com/meaningful-keywords instead of www.mysite.com?index.php?sec=1 and the search engines use them to give a value to your page for the keywords found in them. As a side effect, they are much easier to remember for the average user, and look better on links and search results since they give the user a clue on what the page is about. Same goes for well written tittle tags and a good and logical site structure. But don't let SEO make you create user friendly urls that are stuffed with keywords that have little to do with the

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>