To this day, regardless of what you may be hearing about search engines, search engine optimization remains a key factor for anyone starting out, or maintaining, a website or even a blog. Yes, content is vital. You need to keep your reader interested in what your web site or blog is all about, yet your content itself must reflect proper SEO strategies or you’ll work and work, getting no where fast.

Why Optimize?

Whether your business is local (which by the way is a bit easier to accomplish a presence online) or global, you still need to do what everyone else has been doing for the past decade (or longer):

o Keywords – I’ve seen too many web sites online that either over do the use of keywords, trying to target everything they can lay their hands on or conversely, using all the wrong keywords; ones they don’t stand a remote chance of hitting the front pages of any search engine at all. There are courses out there that assume they are showing you the proper way to select keywords. Most are wrong. While it is a great strategy to see what your competition is doing, if you are not using those keywords on that particular page (or post) as a reinforcement as to why you’ve got it listed at all, then it’s a waste. And, even worse, over time the search engines will pick up on the fact that you are basically cramming keywords into your coding for one purpose only – and they penalize you for doing it wrong.

o Competition – There is an enormous amount of competition for single or smaller phrases, that’s where the idea of the long tailed keyword came into play. It also makes more sense because if you are doing proper research, then you already know that what you are thinking but what others are typing most likely are two very different things. People’s minds work in odd ways. If you are thinking keywords in a straightforward, well this makes the most sense, then you are missing out on all the really strange, but usable, phrases people are typing into the search engines. You could easily place yourself on the front page just by doing your best due diligence to find the proper terms for your area of expertise.

Outsource Your SEO and Get It Right Straight from the Beginning

If you are in doubt regarding your current use of your existing SEO or you are starting a web site and facing the repetitive, but highly necessary, job of optimizing your web site to its full potential, you do have choices. Outsourcing is, of course, a primary one. So don’t ignore the challenges with search engine optimization pretending you don’t have to optimize. It would be more than a bit like shooting yourself in the foot.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Google’s page rank is finally meeting its (long overdue) end.

I don’t know how many pages I’ve visited of late that get decent (or boatloads of) traffic yet have no or very low PRs. In reverse, you’ve got the huge PR website, yet you can easily tell (via add ons, etc.) that no one knows they even exist.

For further proof, head to the Google search itself. Type in anything you want (I typed in “latest news google pr“) then start scanning and researching the leading results. For my particular phrase, front page results reflected posts and web pages posted last month to several years ago. I did check the “pr” and “alexa” for many of them. No surprise to find that front page results included sites without any PR at all – along with some with traffic so minuscule anyone would be shaking their head over “why the front page?” (Maybe our accompanying illustration helps reinforce the head scratching, mind boggling way this is all “determined.”)

It’s fact – while there are popular sites (depending on what you type) like WebMD or Amazon in your search results, you always find within those same front page results websites with no PR and a variety of traffic (low to high).

So I’m going to go further out on that limb to say that I think when it comes to choosing “traffic versus Google PR” that anyone in their right mind would opt for the traffic, right?

Boatloads of traffic!

The Google PR used to be a badge of honor, and many a webmaster or seo expert sweated bullets over this one. Maybe some still do.

However, even the folks at Google cannot or will not tell (or do not know) whether PR really means a hill of beans in the end.

What prompted this post was an inspection this morning of my ezine advertising website.

At one point in its so far 7 year history, it achieved a traffic rank of under 21K and held onto a PR 4 (for this type of niche this was outstanding). Then along came one of those infamous algorithm changes and now… well this morning on my end of the world there is no PR on the site. Zip, zilch, nada.

Now it could be the folks at Google are in some cycle doing updates again. Could be the poor thing just lost out in this latest round of bids for ranking. Be that as it may, thankfully it does sit on the front page for many of the distinct keywords necessary for folks to find it. And that’s what counts.

Google plays with their algorithm so much and so often, you could easily drive yourself insane figuring out your next move. Running around in circles trying to please or appease, you’ll not only get dizzy, but allow much of your competition to race right past you.

What should you be working on? Words. Content. And more importantly, in SEO terms, keyword content. You do have to know the difference between appropriately working those keywords into your content (and which ones are really going to be any use to you in the first place) and cramming them into metas and content like there’s no tomorrow. Do not be short sighted nor mislead by shady tactics.

The time is ripe for the rest of the world to just “do their own thing.” Work your website or blog the way you wish to work it (and start having fun for a change). Go for the gold, go for traffic. Let’s also hope that Google drops this antiquated ranking platform very, very soon.

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This morning while participating over at ForumFinder [40,466 Alexa traffic rank], my eye was caught by a particular post at U-G-H [108,508 Alexa].

The post itself, One Step Closer to the Living Room YouTube Goes Widescreen is not only interesting in terms of YouTube, (can you guess what YouTube is up to now? LOL), but in the formatting – the WAY – in which the post is constructed.

And it’s done brilliantly! (more…)