I just finished reading a post from Half’s SEO Notebook titled Your Obsession to Rank Higher is the Final Nail in Your Coffin. The whole post is a rant against those who don’t see that they need to do something special with their web sites, and who are, well, obsessed only with ranking higher.
As he aptly puts it: “If making money is your only goal on the web, I don’t want you as a client”, and “I don’t have time to waste promoting mediocrity”.
These are statements I fully agree with. You can’t expect your website to survive the test of time if it is not a quality site. This means more than producing acceptable quality content on the same topics that tons of other sites have already covered. You need to go considerably further than that. You are going to need to produce something special.
Even a small local business can offer something unique. For example, you can focus on the local aspects of your business and emphasize that in the content on your site.
The challenge can be harder if you are the 85th person to put a site out there to sell blue widgets online. It’s going to be very, very hard to truly be unique. Yet you must find a way if you want to survive.
There is way, way too much money on the web to imagine that you can build a large online business with a crappy site, just by using SEO “tricks”. Ultimately, success is going to depend on your bringing something of value to the table, just as it does everywhere else in the business world.
