Over-the-top SEO degrades quality
Instant credibility goes a long way when gathering online traffic and attempting to maintain it. You over-Ad your page, and plug in some nasty SEO text, and you’ve all but lost your audience. Someone might come visit once, by accident, or because you are saying all the right SEO things, but if you want return visitors, you need to have your pages be content-rich not “SEO-Content” Rich.
I was recently searching online for wallpaper - really just to find out about the file type, size, etc. to use that information in creating my own wallpaper. After clicking on an ad that took me to an “Ad Directory” page and then that took me to another Ad Directory page which gave several links, one on which I chose to click. (irritatingly enough, I don’t really want to give this site more traffic, but I think the example illustrates this well)
You wade through the ads on the page to get to the content which is buried in, guess what? MORE ads. Then there is a block of text down at the bottom which randomly throws in keywords that might come up in a search. At this point, I’m afraid to click on anything because the last thing I want is to get stuck in a never ending ad trail. I decide to abandon my search till another more tolerant day.
I’m read the text and thinking of people like me, who know a bit about SEO and I know this page is just trying get me there. And, well, I did get there. But at what cost?
Unfortunately, this page actually has a decent design potential, but mucked up with SEO content and ads, has zero credibility.
Don’t get sucked into the “traffic black hole” and compromise your brand, your design and the potential for returning visitors. Doing anything you can just to get more traffic is a compromise that will only lead you to an empty site with no visitors and a lot of work down the tubes. It degrades your site foundation which is important for future success.
Just my 2¢ anyway!
© 2007 Jennifer Poyer
August 30th, 2007 at 3:04 am
Wow, nice post.
Some ppl are getting too greedy, trying to get traffic, money, and forgetting about usefulness, loosing it all after all.
As one great American said, you (or your business) should be useful for the society, thats the point of business, money will come to you as a reward if you are useful. And I think that is true for every aspect of life. You have to give, to get something in return. If you try to take (as with getting the traffic with SEO tricks), you are not providing anything useful in return.
September 1st, 2007 at 1:30 am
Agree. As long as the content is there, there will always be people like me who will keep coming.
September 1st, 2007 at 2:29 am
Thanks for the comments guys. I am a firm believe in the idea that you reap what you sow. Somewhat thought provoking to me that character standards transcend boundaries that normally couldn’t be crossed.