SEO Whats it Worth

** Disclaimer -- I believe that SEO is very important, but this blog post gives you something to think about your efforts **

Over the last few years, SEO has become such a huge issue, there are so many Search Engine Optimizer's that have come on the scene. Many of these SEO's believe this or that and some say this will work and this won't while others say just the opposite. It can be horribily overwhelming and confusing for the average Joe ecommerce store owner to understand what they need to do and whats important to do on their site.

Here's how I see this market from 40,000 feet. These top "guru's" of search engine optimization have to keep themselves outfront, on the cutting edge, they have to have those tricks and secrets that make them better than the other SEO down the street. This type of situation brings out those tiny little things that make a difference but at what cost or how important to your actual SEO. They can throw so many different things at you and your site that you can quickly become overwhelmed and confused. What is the actual importance of site content over creating a blog or creating a blog over asking people for links, or requesting links from other websites with certain page ranks and if you get a related content site with a low pagerank that wants to link to your store is that good or bad, but links are good aren't they? Should I say no since they only have a PR of 5? But then, what about the page they land on and the content on the page, is it good enough content, do I have enough keywords for google or yahoo to like it? Where does it stop, actually where do I start Joe starts to ask himself.

I read an article on seomoz.org that had 37 SEO experts and a number of questions asking various things about content, links and pagerank what to do and not to do. This was a very interesting article. One thing that made me chuckle was how one SEO person would say "this" is good, while the next line another SEO person would say "this" doesn't matter or completely opposite "this" doesn't work. I thought, wow, how do you know where to begin, even the "experts" don't agree and they do this for a living, they are eating and breathing this.

This made me think of Joe store owner and how difficult and time consuming his job is. He is trying to buy the right products at the right price. Deal with inventory issues, shipping issues and balancing his credit card statements with his online orders. Then Joe has to add products to his website and come up with great content, utilizing good keywords and that is after he has put together a great website design to make it all look good. He is trying to keep his content and front page fresh with sales and top selling products keeping his text keywordy and refreshing for his customers.

Now he has to do all this other stuff that may or may not get his site ranked well. He can't currenty afford to pay someone thousands of dollars to manage this for him, especially when it's an ever changing world when it comes to SEO. He is in a hole that can be hard to get out of. He sits down and is trying to figure it all out.

(Here is the Key)

** Joe's Thoughts **

With my limited time, what are the most important things I can do to push my online store? What are the key things that are the most impactful to make my website a success. I realize that there are many important things and everything I do has some effect big or small, but I can't do them all at this time, so I need to figure out what are the best things I can do that will bring the biggest rewards. Then after I get those in place, I will circle around and add some of these smaller Search Engine Optimization techniques that will give me more boost.

** End Joe's Thoughts **

I think this is where most of the folks who have websites/stores really want to work their SEO but have a hard time nailing down the "important" things that will really make huge impacts on there sites. This is something that I am in search of myself, what are the top 5 or 10 things a store owner can do to create the biggest impact for their website.

Let me call on some of my resources to see if we can get a blog post to find this out.