Blogging for Search Engine Optimisation
Posted on February 26, 2008 by Jexley
Mike Grehan has written yet another article over at ClickZ that I feel I must follow up on, appropriately titled, “Blogging for Search Engine Optimization“. Not necessarily the most unique title for my post, but it fit, and I swapped the “z” for “s” accordingly.
Back in the earlier days of SEO I learned some of my first real and lasting lessons simply by following my blog statistics. I’d been writing it for a very short time, on it’s free-hosted site, before I got a link from an insanely popular other blog. A guy who eventually became a very good friend of mine actually wrote one of those cultural icons, one of those emails that you get forwarded from a friend that just says “FUNNY!” which, in this case, is a profound understatement as this is the kind of thing that makes you laugh so hard you blow coffee out your nose.
I’d emailed him, he’d linked me, and I watched my statistics explode. Not just from visitors from his site, but now people landing on my site for terms that weren’t even necessarily on my site. Odd things, random things, phrases that had nothing to do with my site, yet Google seemed to like me for anyway. I’ll refrain from the exact wordings here, but most were not terribly appropriate to be searching on.
What it taught me though, was that the more I updated, the more the Googlebot came back, and the more I used certain terms on the site, the more likely I was to get hits from Google for them… sometimes within hours. My blog wasn’t written for Search Engine Optimisation, but I was watching it in action anyway.
As you do, I started experimenting, and then starting implementing things I’d learned on my company’s website. My fear of getting Dooced kept me from telling my superiors where I’d learned these tricks and tactics, but they were effective enough to keep anyone from asking.
By the time that I’d started my own company starting a blog was a no-brainer, but being a a professional SEO expert by this point meant that I would actually have to tone down my writing back to a human level. This is the hurdle that I imagine Mike Grehan is speaking to most, as it is typical in this fast-paced world for people to see something that brings positive results quickly and leap all over it.
The key, as it always seems to be, is to write for your users first, Search Engine’s second. Unless you want lots of hits for nerf dart guns or peanut butter parties, that is. Freaks.
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