Go to any webmasters forum, enter the SEO section and see how devotedly people are working on Search Engine Optimization. Making the site bot-friendly (XHTML, CSS, WAI-AAA), amount of indexed pages seems to have an unjustified extra weight and this whole meta tags and keywords density fuss sometimes crosses the line. Is it really that important? It is, if most your traffic comes from Google and other SE, but if it isn’t? You need thousands of pages that has been aggressively promoted for years in order to be ranked high enough.
The thing is, if your website deals with something unique, something that has little (if at all) results in Google, you will show up upon every search anyway, however, if your site deals with popular keywords (which are normally the high paying ones), such as “SEO” (110,000,000 results in Google) or “Digital Cameras” (97,300,000 results in Google) or better off – “Free Software” (1,090,000,000 results in Google. Only), where are you exactly in this list?
Just imagine making one more site about free software… Do you really believe you will make it to the top 10 results? Or even top 50? Ever?? The competition is absolutely inhuman, the money invested in back links and promotion are immeasurable and no matter how perfectly your website will be optimized for SEO – you won’t get more than a few hundreds of visitors from SE’s. It’s a fact that most “average” websites (I mean we are excluding MS, Apple, CNet, Download.com, and some others of that rank) do not benefit from more than 20% – 30% of traffic from SE. Most websites have even less. A lot less.
So, does SEO worth dedicating hours to?
Ya, its worth dedicating hours to (well it is to me),
I doubt that I’ll get in the top 10 or 50 though..
anyways, nice article
Most of my sites get 50-75% traffic from search engines, the vast majority of that from Google.
Sites with a high offline marketing spend will get more direct traffic obviously.
I think spending time on SEO is important, but it will only pay off if other elements of your site are right. On average, quality wins out in the end.
Nice blog by the way. Love the design.