Most SEO is fud for bloggers
13 Jan 07 Filed in:Internet
In a Boag's World podcast last year, it was made quite clear that SEO is over-rated in the brave new world of social bookmarking and news sites. The likes of Digg let users decide what is and isnt good content. Wow! Instead of worrying about robots we can blog to readers? Content could be king after all.
I figure that perfectly organised h tags don't make someone recommend an article to Digg, the quality of the content does. It isnt the meta data man that compels you to tell your friends about a video, it is the content. I am not saying the h tags should be incorrect, because if you want everyone out there to access the content, it needs to be a semantically correct webpage. And I am not saying that you shouldn't be mindful of keywords in the content.
However, what is the point of going through my whole site whittling about whether I have covered the bases for SEO and will google like it and my god, what is SEO anyway... when loads of people are already reading an article I composed without thinking for a second about SEO?
Having got my site set up for easy bookmarking, here I am, living proof that for blogging at least, spending time on content should be a far better use of my time than a traumatic pernickety SEO campaign. 159 visits this week to my SE unoptimised site (remember Google has trawled the whole site for me, thanks) versus 135 visits so far today from Reddit - to read 1 article. Add in 60 visits for an article yesterday, etc etc. and 80% bookmarked traffic returning... It is an interesting scenario at least.
Google is a major asset to have on your side, but sorry, I am not going to turn myself inside out optimising for Google in preference to writing articles and clicking a button to social sites. Call me a whore to fashion, but ...
Not that we will ignore the search engines. We do want to earn some money off Google in the future and will tweak the hell out of Adsense, if we go that route, but no way are we going to get caught up in the SEO fud and minutiae where we are supposed to spend days fine-tuning for robots, I mean, people.
And after reading around the mountains of contradictory advice on something as simple as link exchanges and how links are viewed by Google, SEO credibility as far as this blogger is concerned is dropping fast. In fact, instead of tweaking whatever it is I am supposed to tweak, I will write an article on SEO and see what happens!
Thanks to Paul Boag for the initial tip.
SEO or Social?
I figure that perfectly organised h tags don't make someone recommend an article to Digg, the quality of the content does. It isnt the meta data man that compels you to tell your friends about a video, it is the content. I am not saying the h tags should be incorrect, because if you want everyone out there to access the content, it needs to be a semantically correct webpage. And I am not saying that you shouldn't be mindful of keywords in the content.
However, what is the point of going through my whole site whittling about whether I have covered the bases for SEO and will google like it and my god, what is SEO anyway... when loads of people are already reading an article I composed without thinking for a second about SEO?
Lies damn lies and statistics
Having got my site set up for easy bookmarking, here I am, living proof that for blogging at least, spending time on content should be a far better use of my time than a traumatic pernickety SEO campaign. 159 visits this week to my SE unoptimised site (remember Google has trawled the whole site for me, thanks) versus 135 visits so far today from Reddit - to read 1 article. Add in 60 visits for an article yesterday, etc etc. and 80% bookmarked traffic returning... It is an interesting scenario at least.
Search engines have a place
Google is a major asset to have on your side, but sorry, I am not going to turn myself inside out optimising for Google in preference to writing articles and clicking a button to social sites. Call me a whore to fashion, but ...
Not that we will ignore the search engines. We do want to earn some money off Google in the future and will tweak the hell out of Adsense, if we go that route, but no way are we going to get caught up in the SEO fud and minutiae where we are supposed to spend days fine-tuning for robots, I mean, people.
And after reading around the mountains of contradictory advice on something as simple as link exchanges and how links are viewed by Google, SEO credibility as far as this blogger is concerned is dropping fast. In fact, instead of tweaking whatever it is I am supposed to tweak, I will write an article on SEO and see what happens!
Thanks to Paul Boag for the initial tip.
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