Thursday, June 10, 2010

SEO - Don't Try So Hard

To All Presenters:

Search Engine Optimization is big and getting bigger. Everyone wants to optimize opportunities for search engines to find them and so they embrace the fundamentals of SEO - whatever one perceives them to be.

A musician friend of mine recently launched a site designed to promote his musical endeavors and retail his latest CD. In an effort to attract as much traffic as his servers would allow he applied every conceivable keyword/metatag thing-a-ma-bob from "Britney Spears" and "classical music" to "I Heart Kittens" and "free sex".

Creative? Perhaps.

Effective? Not in the least bit.

What he got for his effort was a good amount of emotional abuse and whoppingly mediocre sales. His ambition failed when he thought he could attract teeny-bobber boy-band fans and/or animal loving / pervert types to his brooding neo-gothic retail engine, and wow them into spending their hard-earned allowances on music they don't generally like.

He soon surrendered his creative thinking and gave in to a bland solution - he referenced relevant concepts such as other dark brooding coffee house musicians too obscure to reference here, and similar things that go bump in the night.

It took some time, but his sales took off once that small population who would enter such terms voluntarily found him popping up repeatedly as one of the two results in their obscure keyword searches.

He found his niche-target audience and they loved him. The masses? Not so much.

THE POINT: Sometimes we really do out think ourselves.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

SEO strategies can be complex or very simple - but as long as they achieve the objective, that's what matters. Good luck to your friend!