3 Things I wish my Dad had Told me about SEO

I plunged into SEO with the best intentions. I really should have checked the water level before I made the leap. Oh well, it's easier to warn others than to whine about lost opportunites.

1. If it's free, automated, "push button", or too easy, it's usually cr*p.
I'm a sucker for long sales pages; still am. I'm too easily overhyped. That means I bought software and ebooks and reports and anything else that promised to take away all my worries and get me into a lounge chair as soon as possible. What I didn't realize is that I probably took more time to read through and learn all that garbage than if I had just learned how to do it the right way in the first place. It's cliche but true, persitence and consistency pay off in the long run.

2. It can get lonely at the top. And make you "broker" at the same time.
We SEO types are posessed by top search engine rankings. In the race to get a #1 position, we lose sight of the ultimate goal...conversions. I would rather have a 10% conversion on 150 visitors than a 1% conversion on 1,000 visitors. But, alas, my ego is fragile. I crave high positions and visitor counts. A hard temptation to fight indeed.

3. "Meta Tags" --> Spanish for "don't waste your time"
Here's how the dialogue begins, usually in a forum: "I can't get any search engine traffic. Will someone please look at my website and offer any suggestions?"

Professional forum groupie: "You don't have any meta tags! You need to include meta tags on your pages. You'll NEVER get ranked if you don't have meta tags". This is certainly something I would have expected to see in 1999, not in 2007. But I do. All the time. In every forum I visit.

There's nothing wrong with meta tags (before the rock throwing begins). They have there place. They just aren't needed for boosting search engine rankings.