Over the years I’ve heard various people say that you should treat your website as if the search engines didn’t exist. The theory behind this assertion is that you don’t want your website to become search engine dependent or that by some magic the search engines will treat your website more favorably in the results for not going overboard with the optimization (which is true but not the same as doing no optimization). Now, even a few of those who work at the major search engines have made similar statements about wishing SEO didn’t exist so that all results would be “natural.”
But, in an online world where search engines do exist and deliver traffic to your website, acting as if they didn’t exist is a mistake. And I’ll tell you why.
If search engines truly didn’t exist we would have to get website traffic directly from other websites such as directories, social media, article banks, blogs, complementary industry websites or even competitor’s websites.
In an online world with no search engines what we’d be neglecting to do is to pay attention to keywords. We wouldn’t have relevant keyword phrases in our website’s titles, body text, internal links, or image alt tags. There would be no meta tags. All of our external links on other websites may have anchor text that says “buy now” or “click here” instead of relevant keyword terms.
Now, if we acted like the search engines didn’t exist and did not do on-page or off-page optimization, how do you think your website would rank in a world such as we really have it with search engines? Badly. Search engines key off of keyword phrases. These phrase may be exact, partial or synonyms but they still count. And of course the words surrounding the keyword phrases count as well.
So, in an ideal world with no search engines, yes, you could act as if the search engines didn’t exist, do a lot of banner and display advertising and pay no attention to keyword phrases with text ads. But, in a world where search engines do exist deciding not to optimize your website is a strategy you can throw right into the wastebasket.
