In a recent post, I took note of steps I took to make my blog more search engine friendly.  While I took the steps to inflate my ego, I’m going to try to step it up a bit as I plan to make more contributions to the blog.. and hopefully write articles that appeal to people who share the same interests.  Aside from my technical attempts at drawing a larger audience, I plan to write more about the Android mobile operating system and my continued misguided adventures in web development.

I noticed today that I finally hit Google’s front page while searching for “Michael Lipson,” which is great news, however that’s just searching for my name.  Jumped 2 pages in less than a week, Google finally redeemed it’s self in comparison to other search engines.

Now here comes my critique of SEO strategies, for the most part.

I’m not the most knowledgeable with SEO, but in my humility, I have to say that marketing a website is beyond getting hits.  This is what SEO has become, and it’s becoming more and more emphasized by the website owners that I’ve worked with over the last year or so.

The first question I ask when working with a new client (or on a new project with a returning client) is “who is your target audience?”  The idea of marketing a website; whether it’s commercial, political, publication or community is to obtain a significant share of the audience.  You’re not going to do this through SEO anywhere as effectively as focusing on advertising in niche markets and focusing energy to please the audience you’ve collected thus far.

This brings me to “knowing your audience.”  Surprisingly, this isn’t commonsense for quite a few people.. I’ve worked with people who have been equally surprised when I’ve asked them what type of content they’ll host on their site (no, I didn’t follow up with the project).  The common assumption is that “if it exists people will look at it,” instead of trying to optimize their site for their audience thus optimizing the revenue generated on their site.