The only thing worse than having a very high percentage of your traffic come from Google is not having it at all.
My sites typically get 75% of their traffic from search engines. I know that it could be all gone tomorrow, so I've worked on developing new sources of referrals. I still haven't found anything that delivers traffic as consistently as SEO.
In fact, generating advertising revenue from long tail traffic is a big part of my business. I don't feel like I'm in a death trap. Implementing the advertising is actually one of the best things that has happened to my business in a long time.
My company is a content business, not a software business, but I've never worried that I'm over-optimizing. If anything, I feel like I spend too little time micro-optimizing, and I spend a lot of time focusing on SEO.
Exactly our point. If you clearly know that search traffic works for you, invest most resources there. However if you are a resource constrained startup building a community (like quora for example) you may wanna keep SEO as your second or third priority. Your number one priority, atleast early on should be to make sure people are interacting on your site.
I agree that your product should be your #1 focus. Lots of users landing on a site that offers a poor experience is a waste. However, the problem with that is that investments in SEO compounds over time. Not only are aged links valuable, but as your rankings increase, you tend to build more links.
A good user experience can also offer compounding returns, but it's hard to test and improve user experience without users. SEO can provide a steady, free stream of users that enables you to test changes large and small at a statistically significant level. That's really valuable.
Comments
The only thing worse than having a very high percentage of your traffic come from Google is not having it at all.
My sites typically get 75% of their traffic from search engines. I know that it could be all gone tomorrow, so I've worked on developing new sources of referrals. I still haven't found anything that delivers traffic as consistently as SEO.
In fact, generating advertising revenue from long tail traffic is a big part of my business. I don't feel like I'm in a death trap. Implementing the advertising is actually one of the best things that has happened to my business in a long time.
My company is a content business, not a software business, but I've never worried that I'm over-optimizing. If anything, I feel like I spend too little time micro-optimizing, and I spend a lot of time focusing on SEO.
Exactly our point. If you clearly know that search traffic works for you, invest most resources there. However if you are a resource constrained startup building a community (like quora for example) you may wanna keep SEO as your second or third priority. Your number one priority, atleast early on should be to make sure people are interacting on your site.
I agree that your product should be your #1 focus. Lots of users landing on a site that offers a poor experience is a waste. However, the problem with that is that investments in SEO compounds over time. Not only are aged links valuable, but as your rankings increase, you tend to build more links.
Aaron Wall calls it Self Reinforcing Authority: http://www.seobook.com/archives/002033.shtml
A good user experience can also offer compounding returns, but it's hard to test and improve user experience without users. SEO can provide a steady, free stream of users that enables you to test changes large and small at a statistically significant level. That's really valuable.