As I ponder SEO and SEM in general, and link it, in my mind with more traditional forms of marketing, I arrive at some very definite opinions. I am curious how my SEO core philosophy fares with the experience and philosophies of others in the industry. Especially curious of the opinions of Danny, and others who I hold in such high regard that post on the forum. I share this philosophy for the following reason.

I am fairly new to this community, but by no means new to SEO. I have spent eight years building and optimizing websites. I have spent the majority of those eight years doing my own research, reading the blogs, and staying out of the online communities for the most part. Now as I join the fray so to speak, I see that the opinions that I have developed in my own little universe of personal thought, clash to some extent with those of others. Yet these opinions have served me well over those years, helping me to build a successful network of children's websites.

I should probably warn you that the following is a bit long, and probably a bit borning. Well, not probably, it is boring. sigh.............

Hiram's Core SEO Philosophy - Reader's Digest Version:

In a nut-shell, build your site for the end-user. This should always be your primary goal. Keep SEO in mind, and be smart, but when making decisions about your website, always use 'What will benefit my customers' as your litmus test, and not 'what will benefit me in the search engines'. Don't be dumb, don't waste opportunities to succeed in the SEs, but don't let it consume you either.

Hiram's Core SEO Philosophy - The Expanded Edition:

Build A Good Site
SEO principals should be understood, and incorporated into the site architecture and design, where it makes sense, however, they are not the main litmus test. For example, suppose I want to create a number of custom headers, for each section of my page. I want to use eye-catching graphics, complete with stroked text/ perhaps that is in an arch shape. SEO tells me I should just stick with <h1></h1>, however, experience tells me I am going to get a better conversion rate if I use the graphics.(not always, of course, but often it is the case) Therefore I use the graphics. The end result is that what I loose by not using the header tag, I ultimately make up for, many times over in additional traffic and natural inbound links, due to the great look of the site.
Likewise, good SEO professionals never would be so dumb as to use a flash application to deliver hundreds of articles to an end user. Are you kidding me? Waste all that search engine fodder. Yet, market research, and experience tells me that my audience would much rather pull the articles up in a fun tool, with sound effects. (okay, realize that my audience are all school children). Certainly this example would not apply to an adult audience, in which case, you would not use flash. Your users are your litmus test. As a result of using the flash application to deliver fun articles to kids, I end up getting hundreds of natural inbound links to the application, that I would not have gotten to a boring set of articles. The result is that I more than make up for it in the end.

Links Are Important - But Not Because Of PR
I believe that inbound links are the key to a successful website. But not because of the boost it gives to your PR. Links should be sought, again from the perspective of your customer, not from the perspective of the search engine. When seeking links, you should ask yourself, is this link going to deliver targeted traffic to my site, that I can convert? If the answer is no, than I don’t believe the link is worth your time. On my kids websites I get an average of 5 good solid visitors per day per link. Of course some links provide me with several hundred visitors per day, while others only provide one visitor every eternity, but on average 5 per link is what I count on. The result is that by the time you work your way up to several thousand inbound links, if you have sought out good links, you will get a lot of convertible traffic from the links alone. The result is that if you drop out of the SERPs, it does not really matter. Your traffic will hardly dip at all.
That is not to say that you don’t welcome the search engine traffic. It just means you don’t depend on the search engine traffic. The side-effect of seeking out good convertible traffic through links is that your PR does soar, and as a result, you do end up doing well in the search engines.



My feeling is that if you build a smart, well-designed site, that is tailored to your end-users, and if you go out and seek good links, that bring in targeted convertible traffic, your site will succeed with, or without the search engines. As a side-effect to your efforts to create a good site, inevitably you will dominate your keywords, and long-tail search terms.



When do I feel like my site is healthy? When 90% of my over-all traffic is delivered to me by means other than search engines.

You raise many good points. After all, what good is a site optimized for a #1 ranking on Google if, once people reach the site, the site fails to be attractive to members of its target audience?

Good SEO isn't all just about picking the right keywords and instantly achieving high rankings - it's about maintaining a user base, maintaining customers, and maintaining high search engine rankings over time.

One site I know very well has never actively performed any SEO, but it maintains top rankings on all major search engines. The site's creator has never optimized for keywords, researched meta/title tags, or spent any money on Internet marketing - the site's merely filled with lots and lots of good information displayed attractively. Because it has so much good information, the search engines can find lots of related keywords to index, and lots of people naturally link to the site because they like it, further increasing the search engines' opinions of the site.

The site has had #1 rankings for several related keywords for a few years now.

I currently work for a company that performs a lot of SEO, but we always strive for useful pages and information. We've seen the hazards of trying to exploit search engine mechanics, and we've seen how sites with good information can maintain natural high rankings over long periods of time with little additional "optimization."

In my opinion, not enough people concentrate on having good content, and not enough people identify their target audience.

On a side note, I want to be clear that I do think SEO is important. There is no reason to just flat out ignore the search engines. If I can increase my traffic by 10%, that is after all, a really great thing.

Understanding SEO principals can make all the difference in getting that last 10%, and often the last 10% of a business model is what pushes you into profitability.

But so often, I think site owners make the mistake of getting 90% of their traffic from search engines, by focusing way to heavily on them, while ignoring other opportunities. They then further compound the problem by significantly lowering their conversion rate via unattractive sites that are SE friendly, but not customer friendly.

Thus they suffer from a low conversion rate, and a very vulnerable site. If they loose their SE ranking tomorrow, than they loose 90% of their business.