What’s your experience with SEO? Did it increase traffic to your web site?

I asked the question, "What’s your experience with SEO? Did it increase traffic to your web site?", 8 months ago on LinkedIn and received many good responses.

The reason that I posted the question was to find out if SEO was worth the time and effort. There are so many so called “SEO experts” out there who claim that they can get your irrelevant web site on the first page of Google for only $25 per month, or around that amount.

I’ve always believed that it takes more than cleverly worded metatag keyword and descriptions to build a high traffic site. A successful web site needs to have real value or useful content for someone to continue using it. Before SEO is considered, the web site must be improved. You need to ask yourself this question, do people have a reason for coming back to my web site? If your site is a brochure site, the answer would likely be no.

Here are the responses to my LinkedIn question.

Jose Ferreiro

IT Specialist at United Nations – Geneva – Switzerland

Dear Johan,
My experience is that it does!
It is worth to spend time working on the content and keywords related to the content of the website. This is probably the single most important thing you need to do if you want to be found on the web.
Closely related to good content is fresh content. By adding new content regularly, you give visitors a reason to come back.
Warmest regards,
José Ferreiro

Sean Cook, MBA/TM – Salyris Studios

MBA/TM, Technology Management, Joomla CMS Expert, Project Manager

These are my SEO "go-to" guys, so do not hesitate to ask them questions.

Dr Jason Carter, drcarter@flexibleresources.co.uk

Dr Jason Carter & Flexible Resources offer interim service to put the right person in the right place at the right time.

John,
in short no,. the main traffic is gained by links and blogs and wikis and good old word of mouth, and various marketing tecniques.
Jason

Lars Hilse

L’enfant terrible / Web Strategist / Speaker / Social Networker / Entrepreneur [LH79@gmx.net |TopLinked/LION/5000+]

Yes, no question about that… the only question is whether the visitors are quality traffic or junk traffic.
The best way you can increase traffic is through a corporate blog… this because you offer the search engines more substance to index, thus directing more visitors to your website.
If you have further questions please call me.
Lars

Alex Almeda

Pragmatic Quality Advocate

Hi Johan,
It did increase traffic and it did increase SE rankings. The hard part is how to measure whether revenue is due to SEO.
In general, a good SEO can help potentially increase a website’s revenue.
Cheers,
Alex

Massimiliano Dotti

Online Business Manager at A. Manzoni & C.

Hi Johan,
in my experience SEO is as important as SEM (sometimes more).
For example I work for a network that generates half billon page views and when we start up a new service we worked hard on SEO.
After one year 60% of the traffic comes from natural searches although the service is linked from every page of the network almost.
It’s a very good investment, the only issue is you don’t have immediate return in the same way you have it in SEM, but when you reach a good rank, the traffic doesn’t vanish if you stop (or someone force you to) spending money for a couple of months (and it happens…)
It’s a full time job and I think it’s one of the most important aspect when you have to work on a web project unless you have 99,9% brand awarness and you ain’t focused on elevated traffic level.
Best Regards
Massimiliano

Vellyslav Petrov | CRM & SEO

Web Systems & SEO Consultant

Hi Johan,
As Lars pointed, the value of SEO-gained traffic is not the question, the pain is always how to increase the conversion. Without closing the lead to sales loop (with a CRM for example), the efforts, time and resources for both junk and quality traffic are wasted opportunities.

Alex Grechanowski

Online Marketing Professional

We developed and marketed a software application. SEO generated more sales than the PPC

Nathan Harrington

Account Manager at The Database Group

Hi Johan
In my experience it certainly does, however the challenge is how to monetize the traffic you get.
The key to SEO (and SEM) is that it needs to be part of the wider marketing mix, as your traffic will benefit from an integrated and well run programme.
There are of course many ways to boost your search rankings. Building link equity in your site by adding quality links will certainly help, foor example RSS news feeds on relevant news articles is a good start (recommend Adferro). Additionally, developing relevant content will help. One of the biggest developments I saw a positive change come about from was around social media. By allowing content to be bookmarked can have marked improvements.
Regards

Nuno M. Ferreira

Web Adviser, Consultant and Entrepreneur – Location: Portugal

Hello
After a single URL site optimization to be "seo-friendly" (so not a full site optimization) according to google guidelines, the changes in pages indexed by google were the following:
Before URL optimization June to September 2008: 33.000 pages indexed
After URL optimization September to December 2008: 173.000 pages indexed and the organic traffic grew exponentially.
My experience with SEO, is that it works, especially when integrated in a full SEM plan.

Saritha N

Sr. Search Engine Analyst at Ochre Media Pvt Ltd

Yeah same problem with my websites too. As I am working lot with the content, keywords and submissions for all search engines, directories, articles, but no way the traffic is increasing.
I have worked on on page , off page optimization techniques and web 2.0 techniques, every thing regularly, can u suggest me how to increase the traffic my websites.
These are the websites, have a look on that and suggest how to gain traffic and hits to the website.

Daniel Land

MD @ BWDP

Before SEO, I had no traffic. SEO is the main part of internet marketing for me. it’s so much cheaper than PPC, because u can learn SEO and do it for free, but you can’t get free adwords budgets so easily.

Brody Dorland

President & Creative Director, Something Creative, Inc.

Building a website without doing SEO is pretty much the equivalent to opening up a storefront in a dark alley with no signs. Would you do that? No.
There’s this whole "information super highway" at the end of that alley. A solid, consistent SEO effort (both on-site and off-page) gives you the tools to start adding billboards on that highway so those who are looking for you can find you.
At least that’s how I explain it to clients….They seem to get it.

Erica Friedman

Social Media Optimizer, Publisher at ALC Publishing, President of Yuricon

SEO is a process, not a single thing.
good content, optimized for keyword relevance, combined with good use of SEO in coding, can definitely help you rise higher in the SE ranks.
But a good rank won’t mean anything if you don’t have something that your market wants. I’ve seen plenty of sites at the top of the rankings that I clicked away from after a moment or two, because all they had was good SEO, and nothing else.
The core of SEO is good, relevant content. Give people a reason to come to your site – and to come back. Otherwise you could be number one on Google and still have nothing to show for it.
Cheers,
Erica Friedman
Yurikon LLC
Intelligent Business Promotion

Samantha (@smangela) McDuffee

Inbound & E-mail Marketing Professional

I’ve seen great results for blackcatrescue.com, a website for a non-profit cat rescue in Boston.
Focusing on the long tail has also had huge benefits. Our leads are more authentic, engaged and likely to convert to foster or adoptive homes. We focus on 2-4 long tail terms every 2-4 months. Once we’ve successfully targeted a batch of keywords with inbound links and content, we begin targeting a new batch while maintaining the existing pages.
We’re still working on cleaning up our code with CSS style sheets. We’re about half way there, but we’ve already seen an impact.
I use the resources listed below on a regular basis.

Gianluigi Cuccureddu

Consultant @ Traffic4u ★ Marketing Strategist @ Agora Media Group

Hi Johan,
Yes it did and does.
SEO is fundemental.
It’s the (long-term) process of owning your piece of land in the SERP’s.
Invest time and money in it, it’s not easy and there’s lots of competition, depending on the market you’re in.
Best regards,
Gianluigi Cuccureddu

Mike Lesiuk

Web Marketing + SEO Specialist at Marketing Breakthroughs

It did for us, and for many of our clients.
BUT, for some websites, organic traffic isn’t the target. Some clients just need a website so that they can tell people, "go to our website" and they seem legitimate. B2B sales with a lot of face-to-face networking, for example. For some, organic traffic isn’t really going to convert, but having a web presence is very necessary.

Clarification added 8 months ago:

I should add that for many websites SEO is pivotal and the ROI is huge if they’re smart about selecting keywords that will actually convert.

Vladimir Osipov

Web Developer at Zynga

Yes it did. I have optimized my websites for Russian segment of search engines (Yandex and google.ru)

Ben F. Espanto

Traditional and Web Marketer

I manage all our lead generating avenues, which include SEO and PPC.
SEO definitely increases traffic! But buyer beware! Not all SEO providers are the same. SEO will not only increase your traffic, it helps you in the long run. once your site has established a PR value, it stays with you for a while, unlike the "Rogaine of SEM," PPC. Once you stop your PPC campaign, all your leads fall out.

Brandon Thomas

Yes. SEO works as long as the budget corresponds to the competitiveness of the targeted keywords. Some of the posts listed issues such as the difficulty of measuring results. Measuring and valuing an SEO campaign is fairly straight forward. First, by understanding a baseline level of traffic for each keyword that is going to be targeted. Second, by valuing each increase in visitors from the keyword (sale or lead value) then you aggregate that information and simply subtract the cost of the project. This will give you the ROI of the SEO project. If you are an ad based site you can measure the value of a visitor based upon the ad revenue generated or the reduction in PPC. Again, these are measurable down to the keyword level.
Another post said SEO is nothing more than link building and adding content. Those are but a few components of a successful SEO campaign.
I hope this helps. http://fruition.net

Marcin Janowski

Results- and challenge-driven marketing professional with cutting-edge skills and global marketplace experience.

Google wants to help you make your site more "crawlable"…

Links:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/090212-122544

Leah Root

Web Designer, Information Architect, Wordpress and Joomla Expert

SEO has increased traffic. Individual page descriptions and relevant ‘trigger word’ links on a site are as important as keywords. Most importantly, clean, efficient design, and relevant well-written content not only drives *desired* visitors to sites, it makes them stay and purchase services/products/join organization/donate/return the client’s investment.

Ivaylo Kostadinov

Internet Marketing Consultant

Hi Johan,
Yes, the SEO can be really beneficial for any web site if implemented properly. Of course you cannot expect overnight results and stunning success but usually results come in about 3-6 months. A recent survey provided by "Marketing Sherpa" says that the average SEO lift after six months of optimization varies between 38% ( when done in-house) and 110% ( when done by SEO agency). The budget and resources for link development is crucial for the SEO process. That’s why the SEO lift is a function of the links budget & blogging/posting frequency. You might check a few SEO case studies on our web site for more info about SEO results in different industries.
Regards,
Ivaylo Kostadinov

Links:

Josh Chernin

General Manager at Web Industries; Itinerant Writer; and Decent Little League Coach

Hi Johan,
Great question, and great answers. As for myself, I’m about to find out…
Josh.

Alex Birch [linkedin@lifesabirch.org]

Principal at Soltima

My friend who used to work in SEO helped me move up to the #1 Alex Birch on Google. Unfortunately I’ve subsequently lost that place to a google blogger, but still #1 at Yahoo and Live.

Links:

http://www.iyazam.com/web-based-entrepreneur.html

Miles Price

CloudTap.com and http://wiki.imarketingguru.com (SEO/SEM Wiki) Founder – [Miles@iCluck.com] or [MistaLM@gmail.com

Experience is definitely mastery for social media marketing, SEO and SEM — And yes, there is a lot of traffic sent to my sites using organic traffic generation methods.

Hector Moran

Over 10 years experience in training and development and passionate about how technology can enhance peoples lives.

Absolutely! It definately took alot of work to optmize our company site but we have seen a difference in traffic. We have been tracking our metrics with google analytics. This allows us to track our PPC traffic from our organic traffic.
If you have any questions send me an email.
Best Regards
Hector Moran
Striking Web, Inc.
www.strikingweb.com

Links:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Sergei Parshchikov

eCommerce Manager & Webmaster

I manage several online stores and the topic is really crucial for me.
As some already said, web analytics tools cannot tell you all the truth about what traffic is giving you much money and hence you should focus on. You need to plan how to measure such parameters as phone calls number, ICQ inquieries number and online orders count. I use simple self-written CRM for this purpose with exporting to Excel for further analysis.
Using this technique you sometimes get the unpredictable results. The main conclusion I made, if providing SEO is affordable for you in order to put the site in SE’s Top 20 on needed keywords, you can obviously depend on it. Otherwise, you should target on PPC first and continue trying SEO on lower frequency queries. It should give you optimal result.
How to evaluate how much money you need to put the site in Top 20 depends very much on knowing the inside of the market. There are many who cannot stop talking around, it is time to use them))

Jeffrey Lee

Owner & Co-Founder at Lee Creative Media

It has helped increase traffic, and it has also helped me to always think about how the search engine looks at our sites.

Michael Zittel

Owner, Serr.biz LLC

I use SEO in combination with SEM, SMO and BAAM. Generally speaking, it increases traffic for myself, and clients about 30-60 percent and increases ROI accordingly. Ignoring SEO is just silly, as most of it is just making your site readable by the search engines.

Links:

http://www.serr.biz

Link Lg

Owner, Guru Softwares

I mainly use forum signature to build backlinks for me and my clients. I only build around 1100 links. But even now I am having top rank for very competitive keywords.
For example my site www.directorylanka.info is on first page for keyword "best one way links" where competition around 199,000,000.
I have also done blog commenting and social bookmarking but not much.