Okay, let’s just get right down to the brass tacks…is SEO overrated? I can hear a ton of SEO experts right now rattling behind their PCs waiting to give me a frontal lobotomy. Well, before you get out your scalpel, you might want to read the rest of this article. I asked, is SEO overrated. I didn’t say it is. Okay, so let’s find out what side of the fence I fall on in this debate.

What is overrated is somebody insisting that one part of SEO is more important than another or that by concentrating on just ONE part, you can skyrocket your site to the top of the SERPs. If that were true, why are there so many parts to search engine optimization? I’ll tell you why. It’s because each part is important. Now, are all the parts EQUALLY important? Well, that depends on who you ask. I’m going to give you my take on the subject.

Some experts claim that backlinks are the make and break of any site, that no matter how good your content is, if you don’t have a lot of sites linking into you, you’re going nowhere. The theory behind this ludicrous thought is that lots of backlinks show authority. It means other sites respect you. Well, with all the black hat techniques for getting backlinks, this in itself means nothing. And as a friend of mine said, if you’re generating thousands of these little devils artificially, how can you REALLY tell how popular your site is and how much demand there REALLY is for your product? You can’t.

Then you have the side that says that it’s all about content and keyword optimization. Of course if you ask different people what keyword optimization is, you’ll get many different answers. Some will say 2% while others will say 3% or even 4%. My theory behind this is simple. Write for people…NOT for search engines. If you write for people and put up content that actually HELPS them (now THERE’S a novel concept) the search engines will recognize this and rank your site accordingly.

Oh, and let’s not forget those folks who insist that the most important part of the process is going to other people’s sites and posting relevant comments on them in order to get high PR backlinks back to your site. While I will never minimize the importance of finding high quality sites in order to boost your own site up the ranks, this is not the magic bullet that a lot of people think it is. Many high PR sites are no follow anyway, so your only hope is to make comments that are high enough quality so that the people reading them think enough of what you wrote to visit your site on their own.

In case all of this has gone over your head, in my opinion, there is no one thing about SEO that is more important than another and SEO by itself is FAR from overrated. Each of these methods contribute to the health of your site in the SERPs and without these tactics, along with many others, you would probably not even be able to find yourself in the listings.

Yes, search engine optimization is important…ALL of it.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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