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.
Nice. I worry all the time about how much traffic I may be missing out on by not learning everything out there about SEO. I have always felt that if my content is compelling, I would earn “long-term” readers. I think I would rather have “regulars” than 300 daily “one-timers”. I feel better after reading this post, thanks!
This has been hard for me to digest as well because one of the things we always upsell our clients with is SEO consulting / services, but given the impact of Social Media it's an injustice for us as a company to continue to put so much emphasis on SEO during the upsell process. Fortunately a whole new market has opened up allowing us to offer Social consulting at the same time. We have found that most clients will pay for the social saturation aspect just as quickly as they would the SEO because they don't want to mess with it…
I read your post, and open a blog where I used to present some articles regarding the advancements in the medicine, new research going on the field, and other relevant topics. It works fine to gain a continuous attention from the patients. But the same didn’t work much for the website that I created for my clinic. I was eventually required to hire an SEO company. Hiring someone to optimize your website would be a really good idea if you have a new website and/or business venture. Using the services of an experienced Offshore SEO company will give you exactly the results you need. SEO companies are trained to generate a steady continuous flow of quality traffic in order to achieve more revenue for your business. This is one of those factors that many of the people are ignorant of. I am a physicist, and run my own clinic. Marketing was a part that generally doctors are unaware of. I made one website which I though would help me ameliorate my business, but it doesn’t make a great difference as it was far not found on search engines. Then, I came across a website designing and marketing company named as medicalwebexperts.com, with which I had a contract for advertising and optimizing my website to make it google-friendly. The main problem with my website was found to be improper website coding, which resisted my website to be listed in top most search. The company did well in reconstructing my website, making it popular using SEO techniques. The benefits are slowly coming into action. Website helped me getting a good sum of patients at my doorstep. Web marketing really helped my business work, making my investments in SEO worthy.