When SEO Matters… 3 Reasons It Matters A Lot!

(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

Sometimes, SEO matters, sometimes it doesn’t. Do you have a good feel for the difference?

I’m on record here at Website In A Weekend stating that by and largely, when you’re writing evergreen content from a unique or personal perspective, on WordPress, extensive SEO tweaking doesn’t matter too much in the long term. Longevity weighting comes into play, Google and other search engines evolve their algorithms over time, and hot keywords come and go.

However, not everyone has the luxury of writing into the long tail. Sometimes, SEO matters, and it might matter a lot! Here’s a few cases:

1. You have a lot of competitors. For example, if you intend on making a living selling scented candles on the internet, you better learn everything you possibly can about SEO.
2. You need results right now. You can get some of these results using Adwords, but getting ranked highly for organic search might be cheaper.
3. You aren’t using WordPress. Or even worse, you’re building out your own web pages from scratch, by hand. For example, long form sales letters are typically written as static web pages, not as blog posts or pages. In this case, a small investment in learning SEO basics will pay off.

Fortunately for those of us using WordPress, we have about 85% of SEO handled automatically, according to Matt Cutts from Google. This is good to know, and is a compelling reason to use WordPress, even for small, static web sites. Make sure your article titles and <title> elements are good, you’ve covered about half the remaining.

There’s bound to be more reasons when SEO really matters. What have I missed? Leave a comment and let me know…

Tagged as: DIY SEO, Evergreen, Geronimo, Long tail, SEO