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First Impressions - The First Rule of SEO: Quality Is #1 worth the extra effort? "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein I don’t follow the crowd. Sometimes it may take me longer to reach a destination when I forge my own path, but almost always I am pleased with the results of having landed on virgin soil with lots of elbow room. Look at the well traveled path of western philosophy. Philosophers have been debating the same topics for almost three-thousand years without there yet being an agreement on any. If the path chosen by western philosophy does not work, and it has not worked in three-thousand years, then it might be said that it is insane for anyone to keep trying to get new results while still following the same path that leads nowhere. Physics, psychology, biology, and most all other fields of interest share a similar loss of focus. We humans often get ourselves so wrapped up in a topic that we no longer recognize the most simple of reasons why our paths lead nowhere. We work so hard at trying to figure out how to reach a destination that our focus shifts to the process itself while we forget what the goal was. What Is Your Goal? Search engine optimization is not much different. We want our websites to be ranked high on search engines, but we often lose sight of why. Some people believe that having a high ranked website will somehow guarantee a large income: the goal is money, not search engine ranking. Other people believe that having a high ranked site will somehow make them socially popular: the goal is acceptance into society, not search engine ranking. I currently have numerous sites and pages in the top-ten of their keywords on all major search engines, and none of the pages have made me rich nor even popular. One of my websites is ranked number one under generic keywords that ought to be extraordinarily popular, but the site gets less than one-hundred unique visitors a month and absolutely zero feedback. Search engine ranking does not guarantee wealth, popularity, nor much of anything else really. For me, SEO began as a hobby not too unlike chess: a puzzle to explore, a curiosity to satisfy. When I aimed a website for search engine rankings, my only goal was rankings and nothing else. I did not care what popular opinion might be of my sites, and I did not care if I made a dime; all I cared about was earning the ranking. After some years my websites began achieving high rankings, and the curiosity was quenched. Today I still want high search engine rankings, but ranking is no longer the goal. The goal now is to experiment with and to learn how to create the very highest quality websites possible. Stuck in my mind are the words from former child prodigy and cybernetics-famed Norbert Wiener: “Heaven save us from the first novels which are written because a young man desires the prestige of being a novelist rather than because he has something to say! Heaven save us likewise from the mathematical papers which are correct and elegant but without body or spirit. Heaven save us above all from the snobbery which not only admits the possibility of this thin and perfunctory work, but which cries out in a spirit of shrinking arrogance against the competition of vigor and ideas, wherever these may be found! In other words, when there is communication without need for communication, merely so that someone may earn the social and intellectual prestige of being a priest of communication, the quality and communicative value of the message drop like a plummet.” The Human Use of Human Beings, (Da Capo Press, 1988) Similarly, there are many websites in the top-ten of their keywords on search engines that are not merely useless sites, but are actually very ugly of presentation and spirit. My goal is to create as high of quality as is possible online, period. If search engines like it, then good, and if search engines do not like it, then I still don’t care because rank is not the goal. Since I have invested many thousands of hours into the puzzles of SEO, some of my hardest won techniques remain confidential, but I will tell you this: build a quality site, and search engines will smile on you. I can build a website that has most every good SEO technique but not have high quality content, and the site may never so much as reach the top one-hundred list. A website with very little SEO, but with a lot of quality, stands a much better chance of becoming a top-ten. By “quality” I am not referring to gadgets and gimmicks, but rather to accuracy of code, accuracy of language, accuracy of grammar, cleanliness of layout, maturity of design, honesty, and usefulness of topic. The ideal of ‘only present communication where there is a need for communication’ is as applicable for printed materials as it is for websites. Choose the topic that you are most expert at, and build your website around that topic. Think of your website as your Ph.D. thesis, as your most perfect painting, as your most perfect song, the one thing that will endure into future generations as the mark of your existence. Quality becomes the sole goal, and SEO without quality is an act of doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Search engines are nearing a new birth that will cause many current SEO techniques to lose their effectiveness. Are you ready? Unless otherwise stated, all content and graphics are Copyright©2011 by Larry Neal Gowdy. |
