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?