I just had a long conversation with a friend of mine who happens to be in the online gaming space. The gist of our conversation was: If you are trying to run an online business - it’s still a business. Just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean that you’ll hit it big. You need a good business model, you need a website that people find valuable, you need to be solving a problem (or problems), and finally you need to be the supply for a demand.

The reason why I’m pointing this out is that it seems that a lot of people think that if they can just cheaply build traffic they’ll monetize. Not true….

I have worked with a lot of “domainers” in the past. Domainers are companies that own many domain names that tend to get a good amount of type-in traffic. A lot of these companies think that just having a great domain name will seal the deal. But it never does. To make their domains successful it still takes lots of hard work. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing to explain to them…

I’ve been fortunate enough to work with clients that do well on the internet and it’s very interesting to see what business models work for them. For most of them it took a lot of time and patience, and iteration of their business model to get their websites to be profitable. SEO is simply icing on the cake.

The problem is many people in sales, especially those of the pre-web generation, simply don’t *get* internet marketing. Instead they view the web as just another unidirectional medium with which to apply the same “shout it from the rooftops” strategy.

“Do some SEO!”, they quip, when what they really mean is, “forget about the content, just build up our page rank and get us lots of links!”

The problem is that SEO, code, content, links and, of course, sales, are all pretty much intertwined. Appending proper SEO techniques to good code and good content will mean search engines can index your pages effortlessly. This will, of course, increasing its chance of a high search engine rank dramatically.

Having simple and sensible navigation, as well as a sitemap, helps search engine spiders index your site’s pages much quicker. It also helps the user find their way around.
Likewise with the site content; using text that’s broken up into paragraphs so that it can be easily skimmed by the reader, complete with relevant keywords in each header tag, also means the search engines can learn what your site is about much easier.
The actual copy should be search engine optimised but not keyword stuffed. If the copy doesn’t ready naturally and is not compelling, not only will the user loose interest but you also run the risk of making the search engine algorithms smell a rat.

When the website user is presented with good content, clear and uncluttered, that’s easy to navigate and find the products/answers they have come for, two things then happen. Firstly, the site is far more likely to get linked to from elsewhere, without the site owner even needing to ask, and secondly, of course, the user is more likely to stick around and make a purchase.

A lot of site owners, however, still don’t understand this relationship and just think that flinging lots of money at a website to build pagerank will somehow magically convert all those links into sales. And that, I think, SEO or otherwise, is the biggest sin of all.