Which came first, the chicken or the seo?
What should the balance be between adding more features, content, better user interface and fun stuff to your website versus spending time marketing your site and improving your seo? On the one hand, it’s important to have a high quality site. That is the ultimate goal after all. Getting visitor traffic to a useless website full of ads isn’t terribly satisfying (and we hate you, so stop it!).
On the other hand, if no one knows about your website and the seo isn’t good enough to get you to show up in the first couple hundred pages of the search engines, then it doesn’t really matter how good your site is because nobody will see it!
Therein lies the question I’m struggling with this week. Where should I be devoting my time to get the best return on my invested effort? It was an easier decision back when my websites generally needed a lot of design upgrades and were lacking in decent user interface and features, but they’re fairly solid on that now. No, they’re not at all close to being “finished,” whatever that means, but they’re not terrible either.
So perhaps some attention to website promotion and seo is the correct answer. But once I get more traffic, visitors will like my sites better and be more likely to stick around if the sites are more interactive and have more information and fun stuff.
Sigh. I guess it’s a chicken-egg issue. Do you get traffic because you have a cool website, or do you spend time making your website cooler because you have traffic? Six of one, half dozen of the other.