A HighRankings Forum thread has an interesting post by a person who has a site that wants more traffic.
He made one statement that stood out to me, actually a few, but one more than others. The statement is:
All the design and content in the world are useless without traffic, and thus the real world need for SEO.
In today's world of SEO, this thinking seems backwards to me. All the design and content in the world leads to more traffic. Content and site design is part of SEO, it is SEO. Without the quality content, without the awesome user interface and site architecture - how do you get quality traffic from Google or Bing?
SEO 8 years ago, yea - this made sense. But nowadays, in most established niches, including insurance lead generation, you need the content first to get the traffic.
Ammon Johns, aka BlackKnight, who is an old time SEO and relatively quiet in the forums for the past few years, chimed in on this one adding:
First there seem to be the fact that you created a website without actually knowing what it is for. 'Possibly more' than a test site? It leaves me wondering if it really looks as professional as you hope, when yours apparently has no clear reason/purpose for existence other than to test some SEO ideas.
Secondly there's that whole thing of being overly concerned with what other sites are doing - researching the design, content and keywords of the top 20 websites in what field? The top 20 SEO test sites? How did you know they were top 20 before knowing what keywords they'd be ranked in the top 20 for? Do you see what I mean? There's a lot of logical fallacies involved here.
