Does anyone else not care about SEO, or is completely passive about it?

EQnoble said:
Ohh if you build it....they will come :)
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Honestly I really don't know anything about forums and I am not an IT person. I am ignorant of everything. I did go to a webmaster forum for advice once and was told my forum would not grow when I had almost no members. I was not sure what to do, it grew by itself. I have no idea why. It was the world ugliest forum made by someone that didn't and still has no idea about what he is doing. I am anxious to get it off of vB4 once two things are available for me to use.

I am not large by any means but I am not small either. All I know is I didn't market the forum as I didn't know how.
 
I am just waiting on a portal that meets my needs and for AWJunkies to get his subscription system ready then I am moving to XenForo. I am looking forward to an easier to use forum.
 
User said:
I will go ahead and assume that you just hastily skimmed my post. If you go back and re-read what I wrote you will find that what I did actually write is that if you are in a highly competitive field then an extra keyword may make a difference. If you are not in a highly competitive field, thus a niche by my definition, then that difference is for practical purposes irrelevant. What really does make a difference in rankings is content, no amount of SEO magic is going to make up for lack of substance.

SER are only meaningful if the person performing the search is not aware of your resource. Here's what I mean by that: Let's say you are looking for <insert search phrase here>. You type that into Google and Google returns a bunch of results including those from online forums. You will notice that Google bunches forum posts from the same forums together giving you a few threads as hits and then having a link that says "show more results from..."

Now a site that is 100% perfect from a SEO standpoint will still not be in the top results unless they have content that matches the search phrase and unless they have a lot of that content. Search no longer looks at static pages on their own, search now considers the aggregate weight of content that matches the search and essentially ranks pages by volume of relevant content. No amount of SEO will make up for having that content, and that content will trump SEO magic time and again.

IMHO way too much weight is placed on SER because people think that the first link in Google is the one that gets clicked. That may be true if the searcher is completely oblivious about the topic, it is far more likely that the searcher will click a link to a site that (s)he has at the very least heard of before. You can be the 5th link down but if the searcher recognizes the name of your site and associates you with being a known resource then (s)he will click your link instead of the first link.

SEO doesn't result in what you really need which is brand recognition. The name of your site has to be out there visible to potential clients. IMHO one gets a significantly higher value for one's dollar if one spends the cash on marketing rather than SEO.

At the end of the day though there's a very simple way to measure how important search engines really are. One can easily track down from where visitors arrive before they sign up to become members.
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User,

I apologise for my previous reply to you, specifically the first few words. Sorry.
 
xfseo.com.webp
Code: 
http://xfseo.com ?

Looks like someone registered this domain.
Registrant: Cykon Technology Limited Registered through: Easily.NET Domain Name: XFSEO.COM
 
I don't spend much time on SEO (only addon I currently have running is sitemaps) but I like to monitor my sites performance and I noticed that google was the cause of a rapid growth of my forum in which a lot of great members joined my website. Then google suddenly becomes less favorable and I wonder what happened. Google gave me a lot of great members that are keeping my website alive even though user registrations are down (finally got another one today though).
 
Have good Seo with your site is good practice, every little helps. But you still need that content, you can't escape that simple small fact.
 
I do care about SEO but I focus on it organically, if that make sense.

I use Analytics to see my traffic. I use Webtools to see what's driving traffic. I also frame topics keyword heavy.

When you think about the internet and how vast it is, how much information is out there, it's really crazy to find it you go through a very small funnel. Most people, according to Analytics, search through one site - Google. That's a lot of power to control what shows up on a search. In many ways google could stop the source of information if they desired. I'm not saying they have or they will, but they have the ability, IMO.

SEO isn't something that I overly design for, but it wouldn't be good site development if it wasn't considered.

As an FYI - Webtools has shown me something interesting for the last few days. When I select "Search Queries" and set the range for the last day possible, I would normally see a long list in the Ave. Pos. column. Now I just see a pos. in 2 or 3 rows. Very strange.... Though when I google a few specific keywords my site is still one of the top. The information on Webtools is inaccurate. Also, if I go to an obscure page on my site to see if Analytics shows the time on page correctly many times it doesn't. I can sit on a page for 20+ min. and it will show a visit but time on page as 00:00:00... once again, inaccurate. I've tested this many times and my IP address is not blocked.
 
I suppose...but if I don't take care of my urls...my traffic drops from 25-30k to like 5k in a manner of minutes.

But I suppose that has less to do with SEO...and more to just being indexed.
 
Deebs said:
User,

I apologise for my previous reply to you, specifically the first few words. Sorry.
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Don't worry about it, it's pretty easy to get carried away when one feels strongly about something, especially since the written word completely lacks the inflection etc. of the spoken word so it's easy to read something into written words even though they weren't meant that way. I do catch myself doing that all the time.
 
Some of my sites have limited appeal so SEO is not at all important as we are not trying to attract new members.

However a few of my larger sites and sites that I build for people are another matter and I do put quite some effort into them. I don't however employ any outside help as I've never been convinced there's much on offer that I don't already do.
 
If you're using XenForo, then the SEO has already been done for you for the most part so you don't really have to "care" much about catering to SEO.
 
Forsaken said:
Lets not forget all the 'SEO' that is actually just marketing, and completely separate. Annoys me to no end when people confuse the two.
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Exactly what drives me insane about such discussions... people have confused and use SEO with online marketing. SEO is built within most good software now, being CSS, well formed HTML, URL's, correct use of heading tags, page loading, etc, etc... xenforo oozes SEO out of the box.

That has nothing to do with Internet Marketing (Branding), which people begin tossing under the umbrella term SEO. They are vastly different things. SEO is actually dead... it died the moment software developers recognised its importance and begun incorporating all the primary strategies within the software by default.

Now users are left with Internet Marketing, which is branding and advertising, which has nothing to do with optimizing a website for search engine rankings. Xenforo out of the box, is optimized... now you have to go market yourself, brand yourself, get known... totally different things.
 
Does anyone else not care about SEO, or is completely passive about it?
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- I don't care about traffic coming in from search engines. I give out my link directly to people who I think would be interested. Or I directly publish my link on other sites where it is relevant.

- I like semantic HTML. :thumbsup:

- I don't like friendly URLs.

- I don't like search engine submission tools.

- I don't like hidden keywords in the page source for the purpose of gaming the content search.

- I don't like black hat page rank manipulation.

- I don't like page rank. It has turned the search landscape into a popularity contest.

- I like the olden days of pure content search and content groups requiring submission and approval. :thumbsup:

- I don't like tag clouds.
 
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