DEV Community

Cover image for SEO Does Not Matter to Grow Organic Traffic
Joe Hobot
Joe Hobot

Posted on

SEO Does Not Matter to Grow Organic Traffic

Back in the day when I used to own blogs and websites (before I sold them), SEO was much easier than what it requires you to do now in order to rank better in search engines.

Back in 2006 your focus for better SEO was to include great description, about 300 words content and ensure that you mention the keyword a few times, oh and keyword based domain would be an 🍒on top.

That alone could get you ranked No.1 spot on Google.

When everyone figured that out, blogosphere what they called it was a spamsphere of posts with shi*ty content. You would search for something and it would be a useless article.

Then somewhere back in 2007 or around that time, most search engines switched their algorithm to rank sites per quality and authority.

That concept has not changed much except that now you have to also tell search engines what type of content it is.

So from an experienced guy who owned blogs with millions of views, none of SEO really matters, you might gain few hundred or thousand of organic traffic a month but if your content has no quality, those thousands of visitors will not:

  • Tweet Your Content
  • Bookmark Your Website (yes ppl still do that)
  • Remember You or Your Domain Name(Startup)
  • Link to your website.

When you are starting up, make sure that few SEO points are correct but don't go overboard with creating authority because you are not going to get one unless you have quality content, makes sense right?

Why would I link back and send you 10K visitors to your website and give you juicy backlink if you have a half as﹩ed articles that have no value to my visitors?

Typically if I would start a website of some sorts, here are few things I would personally focus on, please comment below and add some of yours.

  • Logo - needs to be clean

  • Website Title and Description has to be good and on point. (When I search for your website and it just says "Website Name" I probably am not going to click on your website, i'll go and click on one that says "Website Name - We solve problem xyz with xyz product"

  • Website design needs to be clean same colors on every page

  • Blog link - Got to have a blog if you want to create organic traffic no matter what referrals you want to see on your site.

  • Blog posts - I would post at least 1 article a week, now you might think that's not much, but 2000 word article with great flow, custom or amazing pictures and grammar is on point - yeah that's not going to happen in 30 minutes nor it will happen in 2hrs, it would take you at least 5hrs and because its 5hrs long, you might split that into 2-3 days so you can rest and do some other shi* like vacuum your house, or play with your kids 😂.

Conclusion: I wrote this super fast and it probably has valid points, now if I really took 2-3hrs to write this post I would've provided you better grammar, amazing pictures, the flow would be flawless and I would have gotten probably more traction.

Content quality matters, in order for you to gain some traffic and authority you need organic traffic that will come from social media sites and I am not talking about Twitter or Facebook only. Forums, community sites, video games, chatrooms etc, those are all great exposure signals + when you get juicy links from such sites, your authority is going to grow... The more authority you gain through the quality of content, the SEO is going to be great and therefore you will rank better for xyz keywords than your competitors.

Or scratch all what you just read, go with the get rich quick type of mentality and read black hat posts :)

Latest comments (2)

Collapse
 
turnerj profile image
James Turner

I agree with what you're saying, all the meta tags in the world aren't going to help you if your content is bad. That said, you could also say quality content itself is part of SEO or at least part of a good SEO strategy.

Collapse
 
joehobot profile image
Joe Hobot

Agree with your last statement as well.

It all ties together as you said, people these days focus on SEO and backlinks first with 2 blog posts and expect to get 50213110 visitors per day :)

In my rough estimate, to gain some traction it takes about 6-9 months before you see any real organic traffic that will stick and follow.