QUOTE(TechnoCrow @ Dec 15 2004, 05:02 PM)
Anyway, just wanted to share that I'm kinda astonished that many of you don't even care...wow! For me, it's easy - all I do is SEO, that is my job title so I don't need to worry about selling users, etc - just getting placement
...so I've got the time to look into data like this...
And I guess that's where the misunderstanding falls.
See, most of the people here seem to fall into one of two camps.
Either they're business people trying to build their businesses and learn enough about SEO to optimize their own business's site(s), or at least to know enough to avoid being scammed by a hired SEO...
Or they're people who provide services to these businesses.
Business people -- at least the smart ones
-- recognize that positioning and the frequency of spider visits are nice bragging rights, but they don't do diddly to put food on the table or pay the rent. What counts in business, no matter whether in it for the long haul or you're just trying to make a quick buck, is
sales.
For us, "advanced SEO" is SEO that actually benefits the bottom line.
And there's a lot more to it than just getting top rankings "by any means necessary."
Of
course, we care whether the spiders visit and what position our sites get! We just don't care to the
degree that you seem to.
We recognize that things that prevent spiders from visiting may also prove to be barriers to humans trying to use the site. So, we try to make our site navigation to be as easy, intuitive and barrier-free as we possibly can. And we try to make the site code as clean as possible, and the page downloads as quick as possible, and the pages as usable and accessible as possible. These things are good for humans and SE spiders, even if they don't fall under the category of "positioning."
And, naturally, we want to get as much traffic as we can, and we know that higher ranking sites tend to get more traffic, so we want to rank as well as we can. But we also know that all the traffic in the world won't do any good if none of it converts.
What doth it profit a man to have top ten rankings and hourly spider crawls if every human who visiteth his site sayeth, yea verily
, and hightaileth it for the competition within five seconds of arrival?
So we check for spider visits, sure. But more importantly, we're looking at the paths that
human visitors take through our sites. We're checking at what points they enter the site, and at what points they leave. We're tracking conversion ratios and click through rates. Instead of updating our robots.txt and IP-address cloaking scripts, we're tweaking site architecture, page layouts and content to see if we can get a higher conversion ratio.
The name of the game isn't traffic or positioning, it's conversions.Which is, I think, why the question got raised in the first place.
Why do people care so much about how often the spiders visit? Frequency of spider visits has nothing to do with how highly a page will rank, and nothing at all to do with how well a page will convert.
We may call ourselves SEOs or SEMs or Internet Marketers or whatever. But in the final analysis, very few of us here see our business as simply "positioning" and we apparently take a broader definition of "SEO" than what you do. We're here to help ourselves or our clients make
better websites (which is not the same thing as "websites that are better at tricking the SEs") that lead to
higher sales and
more profits.
I think more business people are discovering that while having a website is cool, having a website that actually makes them money is even cooler. And they're becoming more sophisticated about what it takes to get there. It's going to take time, but IMHO the days are numbered when SEOs could make a killing with simply positioning and take no responsibility for whether the site converts any of its traffic to sales. At least with the
smart business people...
My
YMMV, of course.
--Torka
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