The whole world (well Britain at least) seems obsessed with who’s going to be No1 at Christmas. Will it be the winner of the X factor, Susan Boyle, what about St Winifred’s School Choir? Rage Against The Machine are coming up on the outside though with their Facebook Rage Against the Machine For Christmas No 1 page already up to 450,000 members and counting.

It seems to be in our blood. Everyone loves the idea of number one, top of the charts. The Christmas number one in particular. It’s this kind of top of the list, king of the hill, a number one mentality that blinds website owners into trying to optimise their sites for maximum positioning often to the detriment of its conversion performance.

As impressive as it might sound being top 5 on Google or first page on Bing or Yahoo. If you’re only there for being there’s sake then really, what’s the point? Ask yourself, are the keywords winning you these sorts of positions delivering you traffic that counts? Quality traffic that your proposition stands a fair chance of converting? Is your success results driven or a flight of fancy? Like an accountancy website hitting the Digg front page with a blog post about the ghost of Michael Jackson being interviewed by Oprah. What’s the point? Do you honestly think any of that traffic clicking through to your site and probably crashing your server will ever buy your accountancy services? It’s highly unlikely.

Let’s get real about site visitors. We’ve all seen SEO and Internet marketing companies guaranteeing top positions and first page results. Big deal. It’s not hard to rank high on irrelevant, uncompetitive terms.

It IS a popularity contest

Only compete on keywords that are relevant to your business. If you’re an Web Development or Web Design company then top Google or Bing positions on the terms  ‘Web Design’ or ‘Webdev,’ ‘web marketing’ or ‘Website design’ makes perfect sense. You will be in front of exactly the right sort of audience on highly competitive terms. Achieving a Google top 1 for ‘anchovy’ or ‘paintballing’ will win you precious little business as a web design company.

All you achieve with bad SEO is to interrupt the browsing of people most unlikely to be interested in who you are or what you do.

Focus your efforts on people who do care about what you have to offer – your target audience. There are plenty of online tools to help out with your keyword research or just ask your web developer for some advice.

And remember – It’s not a competition for hits. This is business and the only statistic that really matters, when all is said and done, is your bottom line. The only way of boosting your bottom line? Conversions