If there’s one thing the Internet is, it’s a giant repository of duplicate content… If you’ll look around on the web you’re bound to see ideas reused, blog posts recycled, even designs completely stolen and copied. Or, in SEO terms, if you look at the top pages for any keyword you will undoubtedly notice a lot of resemblance, especially in the keywords section, features, etc.

The point here is that the web is an incredibly boring place, and everywhere you turn you are greeted by the same old cliches and pictures of business men smiling and playing instead of working. Of course, from all this boredom, you get comfortable with some concepts such as website navigations, scrollbars, drop-down menus and so on… Conventions are a nice thing to work with, but they will get you nowhere.

SEO is all about creativity, lateral thinking, and finding new ways to monetize web resources. For example, Google did not invent the first search engine, it merely made it user friendly. Which is basically why usability is in itself a great part of SEO, and why customers must first improve the way the website seems to visitors rather than focus on the search engines alone. Create something new and people will be drawn to it. Before long you will have Evangelists preaching to others how you have managed to obtain the attention of your target audience by being different. Apple has done this and they even had “think different” as a motto for all these years.

Lateral thinking is the kind of thinking that treats things from a different perspective that you normally would. Humor, for example, is a good example of lateral thinking. Walt Disney’s famous “think outside the box” test shows lateral thinking, and it’s lateral thinking that we want on the web. The average attention span of an internet visitor is under 15 seconds, 30 if you’re lucky… So you need to impress immediately. Long gone are the days when you’d slap a splash page to impress someone who got to your website, now you have to present your content or perish. Now you must make your website stand out, make organic results so to speak, make sure people come to you for the fun of it.

In that sense I once had a blog which had great youtube videos, three a day, handpicked by me, I gave it an easy to remember name and set it free. I got 3000 unique visitors in one week after launch. This means that content is king and that if you build something worthwhile people will catch up to it and pass it along. However, the same blog would have gone mostly unnoticed if not for my SEO efforts.  I’m thinking original in the sense of different and not in the sense of wacky like below:

I’ve read an article today (http://blog.alexbosworth.net/article/google_destroying_the_web), very interesting take, but a bit too blog-like, where the author explains how Google has destroyed the web by making SEO more important than content. But I beg to differ. Whereas Google can, through cunning SEO tactics, bring you 450000 viewers in one month, it is content that makes them stay, or else you’ll have an 80% bounce rate. Or more…

Point here is that the web is nothing if not interesting, which is why you need to make something more interesting than the average in order to stand out. And then of course, in this day and age, you need SEO counseling or if you’re tech savvy and have the time to waste learn it, because otherwise it’ll be like the best product in the world with no one being able to know it exists.

So get someone to do your SEO bit, listen to their advice, they know the internet a lot more than most CEOs do, and make sure you make killer content for the website you want to stand out or else you’ll fade out. Killer content does not mean wasting tons of money on content creation just for the sake of it, but more to spend money on what brings money. And that is the customer.

As always, if you have any questions of any kind feel free to email me and I’ll give you a moment of my time to help you.