Answer: Almost no one! We would all like our websites to become more popular, attract more readers, etc. Many webmasters will pay good money to achieve better rankings and/or more traffic. Where there is a market, sellers will attempt to fill it. Thus, the huge market for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. Since we are no different than anyone else, we are periodically tempted by the well crafted offers from internet SEO Guru’s latest product launches.
We have learned to be skeptical over the years because so often the advice is trivial, and sometimes dangerous. Google, for example, is not very forgiving if they catch you using “black hat” techniques to improve your rankings. Still, there are people and companies who have been selling their SEO services for years and seem to do well with it. Presumably they have happy customers who give them good referrals.
We have come to realize these systems have two universal themes. “With our system it’s easy”. “With our system you won’t have to write lots of original content“. Original writing is hard. You have to do research, you have to educate yourself, you have to organize and summarize your reference materials. Then you need a good command of the English language and writing skills to craft well written, entertaining, educational articles. Sure, you can try outsourcing your writing needs to India, but it won’t work. Content “Spinning” software may create text that will fool a search engine, but it will not impress a human reader. The technical requirements have gotten easier but if you realistically hope to stand out from the crowd, it is going to take work.
This post was triggered when I saw a video by a guy being touted as “one of the best SEO’s in the world”. One of his solutions for creating the content needed to grow your website was to subscribe to RSS feeds from 20-25 related websites and write a 200 word “review” of what they said. With practice that would take about five minutes so by investing an hour a day you would add 200-250 posts a month to your site. He seemed to think that kind of “content” would be sufficiently interesting for people to link to your site. I am doubtful. I know I would keep looking around until I found the site(s) that were doing their own work.
This aversion to writing creates, in my opinion, a real opportunity for writers. Writing is hard work and writers are poorly paid for what they produce. Unfortunately, many are also computer illiterate or phobic. If writers could conquer their fears of technology they are ideally suited to develop profitable websites. They already know how to do research, how to interview people, how to write entertaining articles, etc. These are all skills the tech heavy online publishing world is weak in. The out of pocket cost of a domain name and website hosting is almost nothing. Readers will give you immediate feedback on what they like or don’t like; you don’t have to wait until the book is published.