SEO Dreck

I remember talking to a startup founder a few years ago. He was doing embedded sales apps -- basically pieces of code you drop into your website to add a e-commerce website. Several public TV stations had picked up the product. He was talking about how easy people thought it was to create a new program and get users.

People say, "hey, just make a sample program and get about 400 users and see how things go." Do you have any idea how hard it is to get 400 users?!? People read about and see these things, yet they have absolutely no idea what's really involved with it.

When starting from zero and needing to get people to participate, you have three strategies: organic SEO, Ads-for-eyeballs, and PR-attack.

Organic SEO is awesome. It goes like this: people search for stuff on the internet. If your site comes up in the top three or so, they click on your link. There they are, looking for stuff. There you are, providing what they're looking for. It's a marriage made in heaven.

Except the tricky part -- getting to the top of Search Engine results. I was reading an article about that today. It's easy. You simply start with a site with 100 articles. Then you add about one new article a day for a year. And by the way, all of your stuff has to be original -- no copying from Wikipedia. Then you do all of this link stuff and contacting other blog owners and everything. Before you know it, it's a year later and badda-bing, badda-boom: you're closing in on the top of the Google search results.

Of course, your hands have fallen off from all of that article-writing, your eyes are bloodshot from finding all those other blogs and getting links back, and the audience for your term has moved on to other things, but hey! You're the man.

Paid ads is much simpler. Write an ad and people will click on the ad and visit your site. What can be easier than that?

Except your ad may cost a buck for each person to visit, and you may only make $.10 from each visitor. It's like the guy who was buying watermelons for a dollar a piece and selling them for a quarter. How do you plan to make a profit, somebody asked. "Sure I'm losing money, but I'll make it up on volume"

Ugh.

The third option is a little bit of each. You simply get a lot of media folks to write articles about your website. People read the articles and boom! They're visiting you. Once again, they're looking for information, you have it. Bob's your uncle.

The only problem with this is getting media people to write articles about your web site. If you could do that easily, you'd be a God of Marketing. There are folks like that in the world. You're probably not one of them.

So that leaves us with -- well -- nothing much. Work like a dog, spend like a dog, bark like a dog and you maybe might get a popular site.

If you're lucky.

My friend decided he wasn't up for all of the excitement. I can't blame him -- it's not an easy road. He would rather write code for the web app he is building. But I'm left with one simple question:

If you're writing web applications, isn't promoting your web site a critical part what you're doing? Once you're writing something that people really need, isn't promotion about ten times more important than coding?

But what do most of us like spending our time talking about and learning?