SEO is a huge industry with people spending a lot of money on it. Most people tend to focus on Google mostly, and almost to the point of it being a religion. Here are a few reasons why you shouldn't take the SEO gurus that seriously.
SEO forums and thread in newsgroups are always buzzing with rumors, speculation, good advice, bad advice, and general banter. Though SEO shouldn't be ignored, it isn't the most important thing and it won't get more traffic for most people than a few simple tactics that a lot of people ignore.
I was out for a beer (actually a few... err.. a lot...) recently with a friend and his partner. They run a series of web sites and have lots of traffic. They actually get a fair amount from search engines. After having a look at the sites, they aren't really optimized that much for search engines. There are some basic things done there, but not a great deal. His partner gave me a rough estimate that about 35% of traffic comes from search engines. That is very high, in case you're wondering.
But there are other ways to get lots of traffic and I rely on them heavily for driving traffic. There's no real magic, but it does take a little bit of know-how.
On one popular site that I run (not Renegade Minds), I took a small sample of about 11 days. Search engine traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN was about 6.5%, with Google being responsible for about 5%. And those figures are up a LOT over what they used to be. I certainly don't rely on them for traffic, and if Google disappeared tomorrow, I'd shrug and crack another beer open. But there are a lot of people out there who have their entire livelyhood built around Google. If Google changes, they could be in real trouble.
But even if I cared as much about search engine traffic as some other people do, it still doesn't matter which search engine people use. A very large number of people find sites through product terms. And the popular site I run is no exception. So whether you plug the product name into MSN, or Yahoo, or Google, or Naver, or Daum, or whatever - I'm still #1. Big deal. Those people will find me anyways. I don't need Google to help.
Don't get me wrong - I do spend time on SEO and I'm very careful with what I do, but it doesn't consume me.
Most of the traffic I get comes from a large number of sites. Some send 1,000 a week, some more, and some only send 10 people to me. Some only send a couple people once, and never send any more. But do the math - just for example, imagine I've got only 500 sites sending just 10 people a day, that's 5,000 a day. When I actually look at my logs, I've got thousands of referrers.
As an example of just how over-rated Google is, a few years ago at a site I was running I had a bunch of key phrases (most 2 or 3 words) that overwhelming dominated the Google search results. One that I remember had about 87 of the top 100 results within 2 clicks of my site, and 9 of the top 10 results. Google did an update, and I dropped down to about 50 of the top 100 and 7 of the top 10 results. The site still ranks #1 for a lot of those phrases.
But how much traffic did I actually get from Google? Not all that much. Yes - it came, but I got a lot more traffic from other sources.
Here at Renegade Minds I occasionally get customers thanking me for such a great product (shameless plug for GDT) and that they found me by searching on Google. I remember one fellow saying to me, "It's great to be #1 in Google" after he found GDT in Google. Do I value Google and search engines? Of course. But when push comes to shove, the amount of hype surrounding SEO is just that - hype.
Actually, I get a fair number of people visiting Renegade Minds searching for "install realvnc" or something similar. A quick search tells me that I've had about 3,500 Google referrals from "realvnc". Not a lot, but I won't complain. The RealVNC stuff is just free tutorials to help people out and I enjoyed writing it. I'm just glad to see that people are using it. That being said, there have been about 37,000 visits to those pages. So Google delivers about 9.5% of that.
When it really comes down to it, search engines will always be important, but when other avenues really deliver the goods, where should you spend your time?
Now, though I haven't lied, and I've been completely truthful, the astute reader will notice a "sin of ommission". Those that really understand the search engines should be able to discern it from the above. I hope you like puzzles :)
Cheers,
Renegade