SEO, the best site promotion at the end of the day?

[whiteRabbit]

Reading many articles and posting a bunch of questions in various forums, I was learning how to promote a website.  There are number of common practices you can apply such as ...

1. Get as many inbound links as you can ...
2. Write articles and get published ...
3. Create "Great" content ...
4. Participate in forums and make useful/helpful comments ...

etc.  The list goes on.

But now I'm thinking that at the end of the day, SEO is the most effective way to promote your site because ...

1. Inbound links do not generate much traffic unless you have tens of thousands of inbound links(at least)
2. Writing articles and getting published can work, but you need to write many many articles and keep doing it
3. "Great" content, yes "Great" content, but it's tough to create as good a content as New York Times, Wall Street Journal and CNet
4. Posting a bunch of messages does not help much unless you post hundreds of thousands of messages and no spam

Anyone care to comment?

[Queen Bee]

I'm in agreement with you here.

Concerning inbound links, the only thing that ever worked for me was partnering with popular friends. One of my close internet friends gets 1 million visitors a month, and ever since he partnered with me I've gotten double the amount of visitors I used to get (Which is still not much).

Concerning "great content", that's a fairly touchy issue as well-- I've seen sites with great content on the 10th page, while the lame ones take the front page; And I think... Why? Isn't it "great" content that gets you to the top? It's really not fair to compare against huge companies like NYT and WST-- Who knows what they did to get good rankings.

Concerning messages in forums, as much as I've posted over the years, I've barely gotten ANY click-throughs. If optimization was my motive for using forums, I would have stopped using them a while ago.

This is just my opinion, but SEO isn't math... There are too many gray areas.

[spherica]

I'll agree, but only to a point.  Links is a part of optimization, as is content.

The list I use for optimization is:

1. Directory Submissions
2. Good use of Title Element
3. Content
4. Header Elements H1 - H6
5. Internal link structure
6. Good use of link anchors/image anchors
7. Good use of Title Attributes
8. Proper Bolding
9. Link Exchanges
10. More content, links
11. Validation (this helps spiders crawl, as well as helps find errors in the code)
12. May want to consider Meta Description

What I will say about links is its not always quantity, its quality.

[milette]

Good SEO USED to be the best method -- but thanks to Google's latest algorithm, if you are trying to target even any remotely popular keywords, you're going to get hammered.

For example, my site -- Custom Toolbars http://www.custom-toolbars.com USED to have position one ranking for "custom toolbars" and several other important keywords -- then, last week it dropped right off Google's search results.

Traffic has dropped almost 50% thanks to the new changes.

Now, I wouldn't be so PO'd with this except for several factors:

1. My site didn't change in any way. I don't use any tricks or spamming. I just try to have good tags used for their intended purposes. The content of the entire site is all about toolbars and how to create them.

2. The results that Google NOW shows for the keywords are pure GARBAGE. Only 3 of the first page results contain the keywords in the title of the page, and many pages don't even have the keyword phrase AT ALL.

Several observances:

1. The number of Google AdWords ads that appear for my keywords has SOARED. Keywords that previously had only 2 or 3 Google ads now have upwards of 5 to 7.

2. Sites Google lists on first page results have a very high percentage of sites that are USING Google AdSense.

3. Sites with high Page Rank, are listed, even when they don't even contain the exact keyword phrase. This means that if you haven't gotten your site into the ODP, which is becoming nearly impossible, then you can also forget about getting decent Google listings for popular keywords.

SO, IMHO, I'd say we're back to publishing articles and participating in forums as good sources of high-quality, targetted traffic...

Best regards, Marty R. Milette, P.Prog.
CTT+, MCT, MCSE+I, MCP+SB, MCSA, MCSD
http://www.custom-toolbars.com

[SensoVision]

Hi Marty and welcome to our community! actually I just check and your site seems to appear first when I'm searching for "custom toolbars" so check it again...
By the way it seems that you're extensively using <b> tag, which from what I know doesn't counted in Google anymore... maybe once with a algo change start to count it as spamming(just guessing) in Google's classification since too many people abused it by people, same could happen with link exchanges I guess...

[spherica]

I don't want this to come off as a site review Marty, but I think a partial problem you may be having is over populating your site with just a single word, you are in excess of over 50 times using Toolbar(s) on your index page. This may be part of the problem.

As to adding to this, SEO is all about balance ( "Use The Force" lol j/k). SEO is links, content, usablity, attributes, and elliments. And in my case a dictionary to figure out how to spell 

[Vaclav]

1. Get as many inbound links as you can ...
2. Write articles and get published ...
3. Create "Great" content ...
4. Participate in forums and make useful/helpful comments ...

This will get you links. And links ARE SEO, are not they?

[Hope]

This will get you links. And links ARE SEO, are not they?

Linking is part of SEO. SEO is a lot more than just links.

[Vaclav]

Linking is part of SEO. SEO is a lot more than just links.

Look at the seoinc. 1st for SEO, 6500 IBLs GPR4+. I believe that for difficult keywords, links are 80% of the success, perhaps more. Of coures I am not talking about SEM. This is diferent you need webdesign, psychology, much more.

[Hope]

There are a lot of things that make up SEO. SEO is different for each search engine. You are talking Google. Googles algo is different from Yahoo or MSN. For Google inbound links are extremely important. They account for at least 50% of the algo. Other search engines don't put as much stock into the inbound links.

Other factors that make a difference for various search engines are:

Title tag
Description tag
body text

[Vaclav]

You are right, sorry. I am always forgetting that there are other engines. In fact, everybody is using Google in my country and Google is the only major international SE frequently crawling domains in the .cz zone. But I believe that Yahoo is about to place more weight on IBLs as well (http://www.e-marketing-news.co.uk/april_2004.html#yahoo).