...is that when chasing a high Google spot, it is easy to get caught up and obsessed by SEO on your sites. Don't get me wrong some basic SEO is needed but I personally feel I have wasted many hours looking for the golden bullet to get on that first page. Build sites and add content with your visitors in mind and they will follow.
yes i feel the same way.. after all visitors are one who will view our site and use our services not search engines so we must build site keeping visitors in first place
exactly, aim for visitor satisfaction, have ways to keep a user keen and want to come back (and even link bait ). If need be change a few things for SEO and your away
I have learned long ago that chasing number one in Google is worthless. Well, SEO is not dead and it does not hurt to follow SEO's best practices but it is not very realistic to expect that if you do everything as per the SEO book, success will come. But I have seen some sites that desperately need at least some SEO, so doing without any SEO is hardly the best strategy.
SEO is important to keep in mind when building your site, but spending too much time on SEO rather than worrying about content and user satisfaction wont amount to much. A good site doesn't need a top spot on Google, well written content and informative pages will create a wind of the best marketing of all - word of mouth. Glad you realized that you were getting too caught up and did something to change it
If your building pages to try and rank on the first page of google, you should at least do a competitor analysis. Some phrases and industries are very competitive and may never be reached depending on budgets and resources. It is true that content plays a vital role, but without some basic SEO (link building, social search, PR) your site is not gonna go anywhere.