The Focus of Your Blog- Search Engine Tunnel vision or not?

I have recently been inspired by two friends who consistently strive to keep the focus of their sites on CONTENT and RELEVANCE rather than Search Engine Optimization...David Smith and Morgan Carey. Both have very different online sites and presences. The key to it is that they both have noticed the trend and are trying to buck it in an increasingly Search Engine obsessed world.

If you are looking for Morgan’s thought on it, you can find it in the BLOGS board of his forum. David’s post about the SEO cult was solid work and recommended reading.

I purposely did NOT link to their specific post because I think you would benefit from reading some of their handiwork. One is a forum and social networking site for REALTORS and the other is a blog that serves as a lab and a great information source for those learning the craft.

Hmmm…craft vs business…There’s a useful distinction as well.

Are you generating content or are you writing a post?

Are you conveying thoughts and feelings or are you stuffing keywords?

Is what you write AUTHENTICALLY you?

I lived in Korea as a missionary for 2 years about 20 years ago…As I had the opportunity to view other missionaries during the last few months of them being in Korea before going home, one of the things that I figured out was that if they wanted the time to go fast, it did not. By the same token if they were enjoying their time and wanted it to go slow, it would not! No getting around it. It was what it was.

There is no way for me to diagnose 100% what SEO tunnel vision is, but I have created a self diagnosis test!

SEO Tunnel Vision Self Diagnosis Kit

If you ask me if you have it…THEN YOU HAVE IT.

If you ask me as an SEO consultant how many keywords you should put per hundred words of text in this post, THEN YOU HAVE IT.

If you are looking for the edges of the algorithm to find where the limits are, then you are not blogging. You are generating content. AND YOU HAVE IT.

Do you FEEL what you are writing? Does it SPEAK to you? If not, YOU HAVE IT.

Wierd, huh? and this coming from a guy doing search engine optimization! (but doing it right and building a long term asset and not just a site–that’s the key.)

If you try to blend too much science into your art, you can end up with a work of art that is GENERATED and HAS NO SOUL. Your blogs and sites and forums and communities must have SOUL in order to convert the traffic that Search Engines generate into RELATIONSHIPS and then into CLIENTS.

Thoughts?

a Webpage by any other name…(even post or category)

Dave Smith and Greg Swann are two of my favorite people that I have never met in person (yet). Why? Because they are into some of the things that I am into. They are some of the best bloggers around. They can write far better than I and I like people that I aspire to be like. They are thinkers. They like to teach and inform, not just broadcast on the net. They are REALTORS. And they like to learn and experiment on their respective labs on the web.

A starting point:

“A house is just a place for your stuff. That’s why your “stuff” is “stuff” and everyone else’s “stuff” is “crap”.

–George Carlin

“A blog has places for you to put your stuff. They are webpages. Whether they are called pages or posts or even categories, a webage by any other name still ranks the same in Google if identically constructed.”

–Eric Blackwell
Just over two months ago Greg put a blog together as an experiment to test the search engine characteristics of a Wordpress blog constructed out of pages rather than posts. Essentially this challenges my position stated above. One of these characteristics was how many of the pages would stay fully indexed in Google as opposed to slipping to their supplemental index. Would this be better than a blog constructed of posts? Was / Is there an appreciable difference? This was and is a concern to bloggers in that their individual posts slipping into the supplemental (can) affect the amount of exposure that a post gets on the web.

Greg’s results as reported earlier today on the RealEstateBlogLab are impressive.  With essentially pages only and no posts, Greg recorded just 6 pages slipping to the supplementals. More impressively, the pages that were there were ones that you’d expect to find in the supplemental index.

Now me, being the hands on search engine “figure it outer” guy that I am, I have to look at experiments like this and offer some explanations and present them to the rest of the blogging world for their comment. Here goes:

The key to this experiment lies in the question Why. Why did the pages stay indexed? Why do posts slip into the supplemental index? Here are some hopefully enlightening answers:

1) Greg’s test blog was constructed with many of the pages essentially linking to each other.  If you look down the right hand column of the blog, you will see MANY of the posts (errr….pages) there on every page. This “interlinking” is not veiwed by Google as an incestuous thing. It is simply good navigation. It is esentially providing many more inbound internal links to EACH post.

Here’s a truly ugly sketch of it….

2) In a typical blog construction with posts (errr…posts) you would not have near the interlinking that this blog has. This is because posts are typically arranged in a heirarchy (errr…categories–grin).

What interlinking does is SPREAD the link love between webpages and the only (errr…easiest) way for Google to decide which pages belong in the main index is how much respect they have on the web as expressed by link love (internal OR external).

The takeaway: When constructing a blog, set it up so that there is the maximum opportunity for interlinking to occur. Given the same amount of links from the outside, your posts and pages will get more exposure this way. It also provides your reader with easier navigation. Win-win.

Takeaway #2: Get links to pages either from external or internal sources to keep them in the main index.

Great job on the experiment guys. Please feel free to comment on this…

Roadmap to Profitable Blogging

I am a regular fan of many blogs that I am quite sure are popular (and profitable) for their owners. Many of these folks have converted their passion for writing into a full time  venture that pays them well, while others languish in the throes of Mt Dew, coffee and an upset spouse without making a dime. What is the difference between these people in my opinion?

A plan.

The profitable blogger is simply one who plans his or her moves carefully, works hard and builds an asset that compensates them for their time. Blogging (and especially business related blogging) should not be relegated to those who are passionate professionals, but professionals nonetheless.

Amateur: He who does not cover his costs and compensate himself for his time, no matter how accomplished he may be.

Professional: One who understands the business well enough to understand their worth and charge accordingly.

There was a rather lengthy and interesting debate on the Bloodhound blog recently about real estate bloggers and how they count their success. I would posit that the only way that you can fairly judge a blog or ANY form of promotional activity is the old fashioned way:

Revenue (Comminssions) – Expenses (including labor for your blogging time) = Profitability

If you are an expert and you blog to gain readership of your ideas and to promote your way of doing things, then the only way to measure the success of that is  in the numbers of converts created. True in evangelism. True in sales. True in life.

Hits. Schmidts.

Pageviews. Schmageviews.

As the song says. “It don’t mean nothing til you sign it on the dotted line…”

So you start by creating a plan. Plan the number of readers you want. Visualize them. Plan what it takes to provide them what they CRAVE. (Often it is something unique that they are not getting elsewhere) **cough** Solid, easily digested information **cough**

Look for ways to find partners in providing the info to your target audience. Complimentary industries are a GREAT source. Current vendors are good. Provide information and sale will follow. Do not provide a sales pitch and hope to convert many. People are not coming to see a sales pitch. They are coming for authoritative info.

NEXT Post on the Road map–planning your time…

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