Declare your independence from search engines! Today, I added a new member's only section against search engine dependence. I will help educate domainers about natural website traffic that is generated solely by Word of Mouth, Buzzmarketing, Branding and/or Promotion.

Clarity

First off, let me make it clear by saying this isn't a campaign against search engines themselves. Personally, I love Google. This isn't about anti-seo either. I still optimize for search engines. This is about dependence on search engines for revenue and traffic. I see it all the time with domainers; worried about their Page Rank and search ranking.

So what happens when competitors outrank you? What happens when the search engines change their rules after you've spend hundreds or man hours and dollars tweaking your website? You lose your rank. Your website and revenue suffers.

That's why we need to stop depending on search engines for our website traffic and start combining SEO with other methods.

Why SEO Sucks

Back when search engines were a little more stupid (notice I never referred to them being smart in the first place), it was easier to become listed with good keywords. But that's about all there was to it. Now that they've gotten a little more sophisticated, you have to spend hours and hours of tweaking and promoting just to slightly bump up your page rank. Then, if the algorithm changes, you're back to square one.

The main reasons search engines suck:

* You can't get the latest information fast enough; pages aren't spidered often enough.
* There is still an advantage for Black Hat SEOs.
* Cheat detection methods aren't sophisticated enough.
* The user may have to go through several searches before finding exactly what they want.
* They can't spider dynamic pages (ie: the invisible web).

We Need a Solution

Until search engines can serve our exact needs, it's best to find another solution for promotion and marketing. I will teach users different methods of marketing; mixing online and offline techniques. I also have a few tricks up my sleeve I'm going to introduce in future posts.

I do NOT focus on traffic via SEO methods. However, I do basic SEO, monitor stats for a couple months and then do hard core analysis on each site: tweaking and editing as needed. This is done so the user can find the exact content he/she is looking for NOT to gain popularity via search engines.

The algorithms change constantly and it's a big waste of time when you're working on thousands of websites. The best way to approach traffic gain (besides natural type-in) is to think about the user experience FIRST and search engines LAST. While it's a tad worthwhile to do basic SEO, it should not be your only means of traffic. Once the algorithms change, you're screwed. Instead, focus on building your traffic by word of mouth, buzzmarketing and branding, leaving search engines last on the list.

Tia Wood