SEO isn't all it's cracked up to be. You are all trying so hard to rank for certain words and the like, but if you have good content, the rankings will come. Sure, you might want to do a few things like make sure your keyword is in your domain, you use H1 tags, etc. But honestly, if you have the best content you will be #1. That's why "Harry Potter" searches have the warner bros site as #1. Because it's about quality, not quantity. I doubt Warner Bros did some major SEO for their site. Also, look at YouTube. It sold for 1.5 billion. That had nothing to do with SEO. </rant>
Well, SEO is about marketing. Say you build the best furniture store that has the best price and highest quality, if no one knows about it, you won't sell anything. Yes, you can rely on word of mouth marketing, but that may not happen within 6 months while your business can't stick around that long without people rushing to your store. What do you need? Marketing. SEO is all about marketing to let people know about what you do. Simply have the best store (content) is far from enough.
They don't really need to, they have an internationally recognised name that alot of big name websites link to naturally. If you start a new website, you need to leverage every advantage out of it to rank. No doubt what niche your site, there's 10 big budget or well established/aged sites that can fill page one and take 70% of the visitors and revenue for that term. By all means if you feel "SEO isn't all it's cracked up to be" don't use it. I personally like getting visitors and revenue from sites in the shortest possible time, it gives me motivation to develop the site further.
good content + no links = no traffic You have to start with something for sure though. Once your quality site does start to attract natural linking, then you may worry less with SEO and even more on quality user experience. </grandaddy>
the thing I think most people worry about though is SEO so they can get PR, which is the backwards way of doing it in my opinion. If they want to worry with SEO, then they should forget about PR and just let it happen. unless you are going to sell links on your site, I really see PR as being worthless.
If 1,000,000 websites each have a good article about the new Harry Potter movie the day it comes out, which one will come out ahead? (Even if we assume all other factors equal, which is unlikely.) SEO is a nudge forward.
You're mindset is correct, but you're naive. SEO still has a huge role--haven't you seen all the sites with crazy query strings appended to URLs and ridiculous password requirements for access to their main content? You are right that good content is probably the most important factor. But by itself, it's not enough--at least 99% of the time. SEO gets the word out and lets quality content earn the links it deserves.
It's more important to make good web pages than to worry about SEO. But with a program like XsitePro or a blog on site SEO is quite easy. Getting one way links from like sites is also easy. So with a little effort you can get the benefit of SEO, but nothing beats great well written content. I think articles and blog comments etc all work well but not has good as Press Releases for building relevant back links. Good Luck
Canned solutions, in my opinion, won't suffice in the long term. Things change and, imo, it's crucial to stay up to date on SEO.
good content would still need links to rank - there are scenarios where only good content doesn't bring in the traffic where as even mediocre content can bring good traffic with the help of good seo