This post from Shoemoney made me laugh: http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/07/09/stop-caring-about-search-engine-traffic-already/ But what he said was something that was already on my mind, raising a few questions: How did the marketers in the pre-Search Engine days do it? Before Google, Alta Vista, HotBot, WebCrawler, etc? Would they still be as successful today if they did everthing minus search? Is it time we start getting back to basics? Should we drop search completely and consider it a fringe benefit of publishing a site, or should it be an active marketing leg? Email and Newsletters were popular in early days of the web. IMs, text messaging, and MySpace are todays popular communications. Should we focus on those? I'm not posting this to find answers to the above questions, but more thought it would make for interesting "SEO Alternative" conversation.
Nah. The web has taken over the world and anyone who would try to market without using it 1% would have a horrible ROI and go bankrupt. Considering the amount of times any particular keyword is searched, hundreds to thousands to even hundreds of thousands (porn) times a day, and the fact that EVERYONE searching for this is actually LOOKING for this info, ie, they aren't reading some sales pitch someone sent them, the revenue for high ranked keywords has to be staggering. Imagine the #1 commercial result for "porn" or "sex" in google... That person who owns that #1 site has to rake in thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a day, just based off of the google searched alone, not even counting yahoo and msn.
people just say whatever they are good at is the way to go, and every other way is a waste of time If you are good at SEO then its the best way, if you are good at email marketing then thats the best way, etc There is no best way for everyone
A smart businessperson realizes that SEO is merely a single part of an overall marketing strategy. The company I work for considers SEO a vital part of our marketing plan, but it is only one part. We didn't stop buying print advertising, sponsorships, radio spots, e-mail newsletters etc once we became #1 in Google. A company who puts all of their marketing eggs into one basket is destined to fail. SEO is merely another marketing tool, it's not necessarily the marketing tool
woahdolla: I disagree. The company who owns the results for "porn" is likely to lose their results in the next week or two. Then those thousands of dollars will be zero, unless they have other ways of bringing people to their site. ferret: you're right. If you're an expert, the vertical you master IS the only way. CJan_NH: I totally agree. This is pretty much aligned with how I do business. The mix is the most important element But it seems everyone is so SEO crazy these days they easily forget the others. It reminds me of the ezine and bulk email days in a big way. Everyone is spamming the same system. Companies will start to lock down (nofollow was weak start, but it was still a start) and laws will start to be passed. its a cycle. history is repeating. and all anyone wants to do is make an easy buck.
If you have "porn" for just one week and get 1 million +++ visitors, even if only 1% of them stuck around for the remainder of the year, you still have 1000 loyal free visitors. and thats the worst case scenario.