Is Search Engine Optimization A Fool’s Game

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Every now and then an email will come through that is critical of search engine optimization. I had the enjoy of receiving one last week. Here is an excerpt:

I have had my blog for two years now, I have never done any search engine optimising but it ranks at number 3 in the PR’s. Why would some people pay to have a number 3 when it comes just by having your blog. The search engine optimising is really only for people with money to waste. They should just wait.

I have copied that excerpt verbatim. He had other tidbits to offer that went along the lines of having a better ranking than some of his competitors.

The email is interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that, to a certain extent, he is right. If you have a website or blog, and you add content on a regular basis, you are going to build a PageRank of 2 or 3 over a period of time. There is a little luck involved. Obviously, whilst not undertaking any conscious strategies, he is also not doing any thing that is a negative.

I replied to his email asking if he knew how many visitors he was getting each day, how many came from the search engines, and how many subscribers he had to his feeds. His reply was “about 50 Feedburner readers with a reach of 1 and I get over 100 visitors each day but I don’t know how many from search engines”. And he doesn’t need search engine optimization strategies.

He will obviously not be targeting any particular keywords. His blog is probably written to a theme or genre which will concentrate on certain words. He may well rank for some of those words as well. However he is probably not getting much in the way of traffic from the search engines.

Does he need SEO? Probably not. He is happy with what he has and good on him. His blog is not a business, it’s a hobby. He doesn’t need any more than that. However, is search engine optimization a fool’s game? If you think it’s a game then – yes it is!