Search engine optimization, or SEO, sometimes seems a lot like dating in high school. The roughish brutes that can scarcely speak in complete sentences will often date the pretty girls, while the bookish types end up alone on Friday nights.
Maybe someday those girls will opt for a headier man, but that's hardly comforting to the guy that spends his Friday night alphabetizing his geode collection. And, should the guy compose a heart-felt poem to the pretty girl of his dreams, he is more likely to be tossed aside as "weird" than appreciated as the girl turns her attention to the underspoken ruffian who says to her "You're hot!"
Search engines are a lot like those high school girls. They'll give keyword-infused but fantastically awful websites high rankings, while the sites with quality content get lost somewhere on page 42 of the search engine results pages.
Why is that so? It's because the smart website owners aren't as smart as they need to be. Sure, they may know their content well, but they haven't learned how to flirt with the search engines and give them what they want.
There will be plenty of crummy websites competing over popular keywords. It becomes a numbers game. And, many of these websites will focus more on gaming the search engines than on building a quality site.
Thus, it is not uncommon to spend time building a quality website, only to have it never be noticed, because all these crummy sites are duking it out in a battle over the top spots. So, the ones in the fray, even if they don't get the number one spot, will at least grab another high spot.
Meanwhile, the site owner who put together a quality website, expecting that the search engines would recognize its quality, ends up home alone with nary a visitor to his site.
The answer would seem to be to toss quality aside and jump into the fight with the others, but that would be wrong. What you need to do is take a two-pronged approach. You need to hook the search engines with a "You're hot!" while battling off the other suitors while at the same time providing quality content so that, once the search engine (or girl) gets to know you, she'll want to keep you around.
And that's why the quality-minded website owner must learn search engine optimization to makes sure the site gets found. Otherwise, like those nice guys in high school, the quality sites may finish last.
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