Your business will fall if Google pulls the rug from under you

Too many people focus on SEO and many people wake up one day to see they went from ranking on the first page on Google to page 20, and they their business falls in a snap of a finger. Don't rely on SEO.

 

I take the traffic from SEO as a bonus and a consequence of producing quality content. There's so many other traffic generation methods so relying no SEO just isn't necessary!

 

Rely on building a brand and social. However, SEO is very important and hard to avoid it.

 

Well, SEO isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It may change but there's always a way to manipulate it. You just need to stay ahead of the curve. OP does make a good point, it's good to diversify your online marketing. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

 

This is the gist of everything. Don't demonize SEO, I can make thousand scenarios of any business failing, same with SEO.

 

Well, you are just correct most of the people rely on SEO for recognition but can i ask you what's wrong in that ? I think there are many small scale industries that doesn't have some spot light on them to keep them stand out. SEO has proved to be the way for those small scale industries as with just the help of simple SEO they can get themselves an spot light. I seriously don't get your point of promoting your brand as there are such big brands available in which if a small scale industries wants to compete can't help you with it.

 

That's why it's important to diversify traffic sources...and build a list!

 

I don't really see the point in this thread...what exactly is the discussion here? Don't use SEO? In this case how do you intend to appear high in search engines in the first place? Or this is a thread demonizing search engines as a source of information? It really is mind-boggling...

 

I think smartlink nailed the purpose of the discussion when he said don't put all of your eggs in one basket. That's what I took away from the original post.

I put very little time and effort into SEO. I take the time to do unique metadata (description and keywords) for everything, and I try to point an occasional link to something on my site, but that is about the extent of it. I didn't even do basic link building for a long time --- couldn't even guess at how many link exchange requests I either declined or ignored.

Personally, I get tired of seeing people promise to get everyone on the top of serps for any keyword, and I get even more tired of seeing people fall for it repeatedly. Here's a secret...you don't have to have top position, or even be on the front page. I guess if you have a limited amount of content that may be more important, but if you are a site that constantly adds new (and unique) content, then the longtail approach will work just as well.