Don't Be Fooled by this Old SEO Trick

Hello! New member, first blog post. Thanks for reading. I publish several blogs, all related to Internet marketing. I'm a partner in an Internet marketing firm in Nashville, so I write a lot about search engine optimization, paid search, social media, etc. For my first blog post here, I wanted to hit on something that I have seen a couple of times lately that bugs the crap out of me. So here goes:

The Trick: To demonstrate your skill in SEO by achieving a very high search engine ranking for a very low competition keyword.

Look, if your site ranks well for a keyword that noone ever uses, have you really accomplished anything? No! My partner relays an interesting story from his days at CJ Marketing about an SEO "expert" coming in and demonstrating how she could take a particular keyword and very quickly get it ranked number one on Google. Fantastic! Only...the web page she optimized was the ONLY result brought back by Google for that keyword. In other words, there was not a single other web page competing against her page for that keyword.

It is easy to be number one when you have ZERO competition!

So don't be fooled by this trick. SEO is not easy. It's not quick. And it's not cheap. If you want your web site to rank for keywords with no competition and no traffic, you don't need an SEO firm. You can easily make that happen yourself. But if you want to rank highly for competitive keywords that may actually drive targeted traffic to your web site, then you need to be prepared for war.

I just blogged about this same topic on my main blog, at http://workmedia.net, but it is heavy on my mind at the moment so I thought I would share it here. Please visit my site to learn more. I am also heavy into Twitter these days, so if anyone is on Twitter, please give me a follow: http://twitter.com/jwork