Great Blog Content –vs- SEO
A while back I did a post on Social Saturation and Search Engine Optimization, in that post I emphasized how important it is to get your content onto the social networks. I was reading a post today by Dawn Foster at Web Worker Daily and she brought up some points that I also agree with and I wanted to share it w/ you.
In her post she mentioned a discussion panel that she was a part of where there were 2 content people and 2 seo people that do seo full time. She hit a home run in the first few sentences on this post and I could not agree with her more:
This weekend I was on an “SEO Smackdown” panel at our local WordCamp Portland. Two of us were from the content side, while the other two panelists were SEO experts. My take on SEO is that writing compelling, interesting blog content that people will want to talk about and link to will get you around 95 percent of the way to good search engine rankings. If you don’t have great content, SEO is not going to be very useful for you. You might be able to do some SEO trickery to get people to your web site, but if they aren’t impressed by the content when they arrive, they won’t stick around long enough to have any impact.
Now, I want to emphasize that I am not advocating abandoning SEO, there are some basic principles that you should adhere to, you can find some of my thoughts on SEO in a post I did a while back, that’s not what this post is about though. You should pay attention to key things such as page titles, descriptions, etc., but you should do that on everything you publish to the web. Much more than that though, you need to focus on your content. Here are some valid points that Dawn brought out in her article…
Write Great Titles
Keep in mind that you are writing titles for human beings, so your title should be catchy and convey the meaning of the post as a first priority. While you write the title, you should also be thinking about the keywords that people might want to use to find your content and make sure that you have included a keyword or two in the title. I’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples of good and bad titles.
- Bad: Dawn’s Thoughts for March
- Better: Analysis of Facebook and Twitter Demographics in March
- Bad: Day 1 of LinuxCon
- Better: Mobile Linux and Open Standards on Day 1 of LinuxCon
Write New and Interesting Content
Write content that people will want to link to and discuss. If you are rehashing the same stories as every other blogger, people are much less likely to read and respond to your content. Write posts that are new, fresh and unique with analysis and insight from your unique background and perspective. You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.
Include Personal Anecdotes
Nothing makes a post unique quite like personal anecdotes based on your experiences. I saw this first-hand when I started writing for WebWorkerDaily. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant post on using Yahoo Pipes and then I wrote a short, quick post about how I dread answering the question, “So, What Do You Do?” during the holidays when talking to non-technical family and friends. The “brilliant” post got a few comments and some traffic, but nothing like the short, personal story about how to answer that difficult question. Human beings read our blog posts, and personal stories resonate with people in a way that technical facts and figures never will.
I just thought that this was very good information and thought that I would share it w/ my readers. Of course, if you work in this industry you well know that getting clients to write content is a lot like pulling teeth, but the ones that do put forth the effort usually see the results from it.
