I am a complete devotee to organic 100% natural SEO/SEM. No artificial words, just pure clean brand building. Your brand name and message is what you should concentrate on building before you worry too heavily about what keywords will drive traffic to your site. If you happen upon the right keywords, yes, it will undoubtedly send traffic to your site, but what kind of traffic? Will they actually care about your brand, product or service? Will they buy? If you focus on getting your brand name out there rather than key words that might relate to your brand, then people who really care about what you do or sell will come looking for YOU specifically, generating more meaningful hits to your website and building a reputation for your name. It’s called brand building.

Case in point here…I am the co-founder of a startup children’s shoe brand called Polliwalks that was founded in ’07. I was responsible for the Marketing and PR for the brand, and was able to build a following that generated hundreds of thousands of results from a Google or Yahoo search for the brand name. How was that done? Primarily by the process of building relationships with select blogging communities, building relationships and trust with consumers and building the brand name recognition within the brand’s consumer group.

Looking at the site analytics, only a handful of people searched for the company site by using keyword search terms. Most visitors found the site by searching for the brand name and/or the web address. Taking a closer look at the analytics, the searches that used keywords, other than the brand name, consistently had a very high bounce rate. They left because they didn’t find what they were looking for. The people that searched by the brand name consistently showed a very low bounce rate. They spent a significant amount of time looking around the site because THEY FOUND WHAT THEY WERE LOOKING FOR! They searched for the brand and they found the brand. I’m not saying that SEO should be ignored, but your brand name should be the main focus of your brand building strategy.

My point here is that it is more important to get your brand name out there, get people talking about your brand in a natural way, and in turn it will get other people specifically and actively looking for you, rather than people looking for something else, finding you instead, then leaving. This kind of essential brand building does take more time to create momentum, but it is by far more meaningful and enduring and will generate true brand awareness, brand loyalty and sales, rather than meaningless traffic to your site. Isn’t that what it’s all about?