Is SEO Necessary For New Business Owners Anymore?

I came across a forum post on DMOZ quite some time ago with a new business owner asking if SEO is necessary anymore. Why this person was asking for this type of advice from DMOZ, I have no idea, but one of the forum moderators chimed in stating that SEO was not necessary. He said that hard quality work is all it takes and that utilizing meta tags is pointless. This is all the “advice” he provided. There really is a lot more to SEO than meta tags.

I do agree that doing hard quality work is very important and is what really counts when building your website, but although meta tags are an extremely small part of SEO, they can still provide value.

When it comes to ranking, these fields are generally useless, which the Google guidelines will tell you, and although Google is the most well known search engine currently, they aren’t the only one available to use, and many other search engines don’t go by the same rules.

If you place the appropriate keywords in the meta keywords tag, it can help a site stay away from a duplicate content filter. This tag can normally be avoided, but it’s a nice fallback, just in case. And as previously mentioned, some search engines may still be using it. Heck, it only takes a couple of seconds to fill in anyway. One thing to note though is that if you utilized the keywords meta tag, you leave your research open for competitors to find.

The description meta tag will not help in rankings, but with the right description, you can entice visitors into coming into your website. Also, if you’ve ever noticed from doing a search in Google, your search query will appear in bold in the description. This is proven to draw the eyes of the user into that listing. I think that makes the Description Meta tag fairly important.

Ok, so those are my thoughts on meta tags, but there is much more to SEO than that.

Keyword Research

  • High Volume
  • Low Competition
  • “Buyer” keywords

On-Page Factors

  • Title tags
  • Meta tags
  • Alt attributes
  • Internal linking
  • Header tags
  • Keyword emphasis (bolding/italicizing)
  • Page load time optimization
  • Broken links
  • HTML and XML sitemap
  • Custom 404
  • Robots.txt
  • Canonical Issues
  • Site architecture analysis

Competitive Analysis

  • Domain age
  • On-page factors
  • Visibility
  • Traffic
  • Incoming links
  • Paid search campaigns

Off-Page Factors

  • Analytics review
  • Incoming backlinks
  • Citations
  • Local optimization

A lot of this may not fit into some peoples definition of “SEO” but would instead call it “SEM” or search engine marketing, but the inexperienced don’t really care about semantics and only want their site to bring in more money. This is why I lumped it all together into the somewhat outdated term.

To answer the original question of the new business owner, no, search engine optimization isn’t absolutely necessary, but if you ever plan to have a successful online business that brings in enough money to put food on the table, then yes it is.

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