Don’t Click This

First off, I should say that I know next to nothing about SEO, I just try and follow these basic principals which I’ve picked up along the way:

-Inbound links are great (one way inbound links even better)
-Link text should always be the keywords you’re trying to rank for
-The higher the PR (of the pages) of links to your site the better
-Content should contain keywords, but not too much

Anywho, when I started out with my first site I was just happy to get links - I didn’t really pay much attention to the link text (most of the time it was simply my URL) or PR or anything of importance from an SEO perspective - mainly because I didn’t know any better. However, I did get traffic from the search engines and I did start to make money. This was because my website was useful, unique and updated. The 3 U’s. I’m not saying that’s all you need to have a succesful website, I’m just saying this is what happened to me.

Now, I’m in a position where I can apply some of the things I have learnt about SEO to my sites to improve their visibilty in the search engines and increase my traffic numbers, but in my honest opinion the 3 U’s are so much more important. Why am I writing this you might ask? Because I think that too many people worry about SEO when they should be more concerned with the content on their site.

At the end of the day if you SEO a website to the number one spot on Google, only to have crappy content, I doubt people are going to hang around. But if you concentrate on writing some quality content and slowly creep up the rankings, maybe you’ll find people will hang around and they’re much more likely to return.

As I said at the begining of my post I’m definitely not an expert and I’m not trying to tell people what to do, I’m just providing an insight into my own experiences. I’ve found that providing you have the 3 U’s, the ‘build it in and they will come’ theory still applies. Obviously, this doesn’t mean a shopping directory, but you get my drift. Content is king after all…