Don’t be Obsessive about SEO
This is the second in my installments of some of the common errors that are made by bloggers around the world. I have previously written about the fact that most beginners rush to join affiliate networks without having the requisite traffic to their sites. This article looks at why SEO sucks and why bloggers should never obsess over things such as link building, keyword research and much more.
Optimizing for Search Engines
Carry out research before launching your site, and you are likely to come across thousands of pieces of advice around the issue of Search Engine Optimization. SEO, really, is intuitive. The goal, for all bloggers, is to attract as much traffic to their sites as is humanly possible. Standing in the way, however, is the fact that there are so many of us desperadoes out there.
Search Engine Optimization represents a way through which you can, with a little bit of luck, stand out from within the crowd. This can be done by taking some or all of the following steps;
- Link building: Having backlinks; links that point back to your pages from other sites, gives you a boost because search engines assume that people are only ever going to link to a web page that is well written and has informative content.
- Links: both internal and external also act as the highways along which Search Engine bots crawl while indexing web content. They are therefore essential to those that wish to have their web pages discovered and catalogued by Google, Yahoo, Yandex and other search engines.
- Regularly publishing well written content: Debate rages on the frequency with which you should publish content on your site. The fact, however, remains that regularly publishing great content gives your site the boost that it needs in order to emerge from within the crowd.
- Keyword Research: Carrying out keyword research before writing your articles allows you to zoom in on the terms that the people who are looking for what you have to offer are typing into search engines. This increases your Search Engine visibility and helps drive traffic to your site.
- Along the same vein, you should also strive to have an appropriate keyword density in your articles. This is another great way through which you can boost your content’s visibility to Search Engines.
- Content length: Search Engines, according to experts, prefer longer length content. What this means is that your content should be a nice length if it is to have a chance of being ranked high.
Why SEO Sucks
- Too many rules
If you use SEO tools such as Yoast, you will discover that there are many more supposedly crucial SEO tenets that you should stick to. This, in any case, is where SEO really begins to suck.
The first thing that I discovered after launching this blog a year ago was that trying to follow each of these unwritten rules can be draining, particularly if, like me, you come from a literature background.
When I sit down to write an article, I hardly need the distraction that comes from trying to remember whether or not I have used the right sort of keywords in the prescribed quantity. The whole thing begins, after only a short while, to feel like being forced to swallow some particularly bitter, strange medicine and one soon loses track of one’s thoughts.
- Age is the biggest SEO factor
Another of the things that I discovered during my year of blogging is that you may write world class content, while religiously sticking to all the useless pieces of SEO advice that are floating out there, but your work will hardly be noticed without good old fashioned domain age.
What this means, in simpler terms, is that Search Engines prefer content that appears on websites that have been around for a long time. You should, therefore, not start to obsess simply because that article on which you worked so has only been read by 5 people.
Stick around long enough, and your work will more than likely begin to creep up the ladder. Unfortunately, many a blogger has been known to give up early, which is why there are so many orphaned sites floating around out there.
- Who actually reads long length content?
The most popular article on this blog only has around 300 words. Others have over 2000 words and they have hardly ever been read. That, of course, has to do with the popularity of the target keywords. I am probably ranking better on keywords on which there is not much competition.
What gets me, however, is the fact that Search Engines are actually misdirected, as far as content length and article ranking are concerned. This is the web, for Pete’s sake! People do not actually have the time and energy to read articles that run to 2000 words!
If I need an eBook on how SEO Sucks, it’s easy enough to head over to Amazon, and I will get something of a nice length. However, on my phone or tablet, I would rather have something that’s not so long. Indeed, I would much prefer something that’s in bullet form, thank you very much!
- Regularly publishing content sucks
Here is yet another brilliant piece of advice from so called SEO gurus. The truth, however, is that most bloggers actually have something better to do with their time than spending hours trying to amuse and inform ungrateful internet users.
The pressure to regularly put out content is why so many archaic articles are being peddled all over the internet. Part of the drive is the desire by bloggers to begin to turn their ventures into sources of income.
The truth, however, is that blogging is one big ponzi scheme. Those who got there early actually made it, along with a sprinkling of others who are fortunate enough to find gaps within the system.
For the rest, blogging won’t ever actually bring even a cent to the table. That is why regularly publishing is likely only ever going to keep you away from other, more practical ways of earning a living.
