Why SEO ? Why do you need search engine optimization ?

It’s a common refrain: “But I’m not trying to sell anything. Why do I need search engine optimization service?” And, on the one hand, it makes sense. If you’re not looking to make money off of your website, why should you spend money promoting it?

But this question suffers from three different misconceptions;

first, that you have to spend money for search engine optimization;

second, that only sites that are trying to sell something make money off their website;

third, that making money is the only reason to use SEO. Let’s examine it one step at a time.
First of all, the misconception that you have to spend money to get good SEO. You can spend money, certainly, either by hiring companies or authors to write SEO content for you, or by hiring services to submit your site to search engines for you, or in a myriad of other ways, some highly beneficial, some not so. But the most basic SEO can be implemented right on your own website by yourself or your webmaster, by using keyword-targeted TITLE and META “description” tags, carefully selecting the keywords in your META “keyword” tag, and filling your website with informative, keyword-rich content. You can pay people to do any of these, of course, but you can also do them yourself for a little time and trouble.

Second, commercial sites–that is, sites who are trying to sell you something–are not the only websites looking to make money from their visitors. Even informational sites often include advertisements or affiliate links, and more visitors means more revenue from these links. In this sense, informational sites can become, in a way “commercial”, making enough money off of affiliates and advertisements to pay for the site’s upkeep. But this only happens when the site gets plenty of visitors, and search engine optimization is all about getting visitors. Which brings us to our next point:
Search engine optimization is about getting people to visit, not just about making money. It has important financial benefits, of course; visitors buy products, visitors click ads–but those are only benefits. SEO is, in the end, about getting people to visit sites. The upshot of that is, any site that wants people to visit it, should be concerned, at least a little bit, with SEO. It may not be worthwhile for a website to spend huge amounts of money on SEO if they don’t plan to benefit financially from incoming traffic. But, as we’ve seen, SEO isn’t just about generating income, and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune.

Because informational sites (we assume) already have rich, informative content that (we assume) people want to read about, they have a leg up on sales-driven sites, where content has to be created to draw people to the site, people who will, hopefully, like the content and become customers. For informational sites, it’s all about the content, anyway, and this means that search engine optimization is easier for them than it is for the commercial sites–but no less important!