Many new business owners ask me what to do with their new brands, they ask me if they should invest in search engine optimization for their websites so that their new sites can be more “visible” on the online world. Here’s the sad news for them, SEO doesn’t mean anything at all, SEO shouldn’t be a noun, and it shouldn’t show up on people’s name card as a job title. Because “content” is the only thing that matters.

Why do Business Owners love to go for SEO

Okay, if SEO doesn’t mean anything, why do small business owners spend money on it? Many of them don’t have enough knowledge on digital techniques like SEO. All they know is that after they invest in some online project with a fancy name (SEO), their company website will show up higher on Google search results. Because the result of having SEO sounds very tangible for them, it’s always easier to convince/trick them to use the services.

Google doesn’t like SEO, they like Content

Many so-called SEO gurus like to claim that they know the magic tricks to control organic results on search engines. They lied. Let’s think about it from Google’s point of view. In order to keep everything as relevant as possible, Google keeps upgrading, and improving their bots’ algorithm with the goal to make their bots smart enough to analyze websites like how human would do. Let’s assume Google bots were human, in order to make him believe that your website is the most relevant result for a keyword, you’ve got to impress him with uniue content as the first step, really doesn’t have anything to do with SEO techniques.

SEO is not a long term solution

Similar to marketing principles, SEO is just like packaging a product. People might like it at first, but after found out that there’s no true value in it, visitors or Google might stop being impressed by it, therefore your well packaged (SEO) site will go back to the rank that you deserve if your content is not impressive to Google.

SEO techniques don’t spread

Sites don’t link to you because of the SEO techniques on your site, they link to you for the original content you created, or maybe for who you are/ what your company does. And Google give page rank mainly based on how many backlinks a website has.

The Real Trick

Sites that can’t be found on the search engine are basically invisible. The best trick to get your site on first page of search results is to ignore all the tricks. When creating a website, think only about how to deliver the best information and how it will interest audience. Think about the true value of your content, what’s in it for your audience? And that’s the ONLY thing you need to know about optimizing your search ranking.

One of the purposes for this website is to showcase my art portfolio (although it’s not completed at this moment), and before I switched this into a blog, it used to be an all-flash website.

Around 2 weeks ago, I had a casual meeting with a client at a cafe, we were then chatting about everything, I told him about how I used to paint everyday, also took fine art as a major in OCAD. He pulled out his iPhone and asked me to show him my work, and of course iPhone couldn’t show flash files.

In search engine optimization, people have been debating whether a flash site is search engine friendly. In my opinion, I think Google is pretty good at scanning on .swf formats these days, the thing is, what about all the tags html use, and what if a person only searched for certain content on a specific page? As many DMers say “visitors these days don’t always visit a site through the front door“, we always have to take good care of each and every page of a website.