When to put SEO to the side
You know what grinds my gears as an SEO professional?
How badly everyone else is doing SEO.
Hold your horses, I’m not on an ego trip.
What I see every day when I search for things is a bunch of trash.
I mean yeah, I could blame Google results for getting worse.
But I also blame SEO folks for just trashing the internet.
I’m looking for Arabic lessons for kids and I get webpages with Arabic lessons for adults.
I’m looking for couriers to deliver between specific locations in the UAE and I get homepages and other irrelevant pages.
Don’t get me started on any food/recipe related content.
And when I do find pages that match my query, they’re so bad, I actually feel insulted when reading it (and trying to navigate between the ads, popups and fluff).
Now since it’s poor form to email webmasters and act like a CyberKaren, here’s how we fix the internet (by fixing ourselves):
Put aside SEO for a moment (this is key - stop thinking about SEO)
Format your page content for clarity - make it super easy for anyone to immediately understand what the page is about
Write to answer questions quickly (if this is what your page is designed to do)
Then and only then, worry about keyword usage (just to ensure you’re using the right words that your audience would use when searching).
And then worry about internal links, use of images (and alt text) and making sure there’s some kind of thing you want people to do (call, email, fill a form, buy).
I know I’ve talked about this a lot recently but cmon, you can’t tell me you’re absolutely loving the search results these days.
If we can’t change others, we change ourselves. And by this I mean our websites.
Honestly, this is how I’ve been doing SEO for the past 2 decades and I’m doing just fine.
Follow me and you’ll be fine too.
You know it makes sense.
Peace,
Jaaved
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