The Challenge

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Optimization Rage

Published by Esteban Glas on December 10th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Blogs, Metrics, Web Marketing

Either if you are a private blogger or if you have anything to do with corporate blogs you’ll crave on increasing traffic. Whether it is for pure ego or for a business need, having people to actually come and read your blog is a good thing.

If you talk to any traditional on-line Marketer they’ll say that SEO is the way to get such traffic. And it is true, to some extent. I won’t write a SEO article giving out tips and tricks on optimizing a blog or site, others have done that before and in a far better way than I could try to achieve. If you are interested in getting some SEO knowledge I’d recommend you reading and looking around at Aaron Wall’s SEO book.

The WordPress community has built several plugins that help optimizing posts and sites with crawlers and robots in mind. You can add keywords, meta tags, sitemaps and a myriad other things to make things more understandable for search engine robots. Yet things are always evolving in the SEO world and new tricks surface almost on a daily basis.

But, as Dylan would say the times they are a changin’. Blogs, wikis and other rich or social media sites don’t rely that much in SEO to attract traffic, since they are more socially engaged. People tend to find them on a slightly different way from the way we’re used to find other things on the web (like a bargain or information on a particular subject, for example).

For blogs particularly the story is quite different. People tend to visit blogs not so much thanks to SEO (although it does play a role in a certain percentage of visits) but more thanks to links, comments, references and social finding & bookmarking sites (Slashdot, Digg, del.icio.us).

Here is an interesting note on how things are connected. As I was writing this entry, news came in from the Pub Owner on a related story. Here’s a short excerpt:

More important than that traffic, however, was the list’s role as “linkbait.” Users on Digg and other social media sites created more than 800 links to Olthuis’ list in forums and blogs around the Web. Because Google ranks a Web site’s relevance based on the number of other sites linking to it, LifeInsure now ranks fourth in Google’s results when the search giant’s millions of users search for “life insurance.” Suddenly, the company had free advertising that put its name right next to huge brands like Metlife and Prudential.

You can read the whole article on forbes here.

(Sidenote: this really depicts how long some drafts take to come to life, Tim’s mail came almost 2 months ago)

This proves that not only rules are quite different for this types of sites, but also that this rules, if played appropriately can also boost SEO. Of course it is no easy thing to get slashdotted or dugg (digged?), but that is a very different issue. One that I personally feel is more honest towards the end user (aka the reader), since it relies more on generating good content instead of trying to fool a robot and trying to make an engine believe you’re the best thing after sliced bread (after all, what do robots know, huh?).

So, the good news for bloggers is that they can get to spend more time delivering worthy content instead of trying to get google to put you on a higher pagerank. It most certainly will pay off better than just hacking a pagerank.

The thinking is certainly refreshing. I’ve grown an allergy towards sites that look more interested in catching search engines than catching me.

It is the tale of good content driving traffic, engaging readers and being the single best thing where to put focus on. If you are on a tight budget (or on no budget at all) and have to make choices, invest in the quality of what you are publishing.

As with all good things in life, the focus on content approach has some difficulties, particularly within companies. It is much harder to effectively measure. If you invest in paid keywords you can fairly easily crosslink the numbers you get, with good content measurement is not as direct and easy. It is also not immediate; some excellent blogs might take months (or even years) to take off. There is trust to be won. Then again you might get dugg on your second post ever and jump to fame almost immediately.

Please remind me to write a post on how to try to measure the ROI and KPI of good content. I have some wild thoughts that I need to thoroughly think, test and try out.

As I already said (quoted, actually) a couple of months ago, Content is the next killer application. As social bookmarking and other word-of-mouth tools evolve and become increasingly popular, and as search engines and indexation systems evolve to take more into account the real, human-aimed content the real SEO will focus more on delivering interesting, well thought and well put content and less on tricking search crawlers.

Bottom line is: trust your content, if you are genuine, honest and smart it’ll pay off much better than any other thing.

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