I’ve read about 10 blog posts in the last month by people who think that writing good content is enough to get high search rankings and that you shouldn’t focus too much on SEO. In a way they are right, since you should write for humans, but in another way they are wrong, since optimization can help a lot.
Here is a real world example of a couple of my blogs compared, and why one ranks higher than the other.
Blog A is about a very specific topic, it currently receives over 80% of its traffic from Google. Each post is very keyword rich, yet short, so they naturally rank high. Because of this the article titles are also very specific.
Blog B covers a fairly broad range of topics and it only gets 5% of its traffic from Google. Each post is pretty lengthy, so the keyword density is not very high. It has 5 times the number of posts as blog A.
The only reason that the younger blog A ranks higher is because it is much easier to optimize articles for very specific long-tail keywords. Because blog B covers such a wide range of topics the posts are not nearly as optimized as they should be.
This quick comparison proves two things: quick and concise posts are the way to go (although this is debatable), and search engine optimization actually does matter.
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March 27th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
I’ve never found it terribly hard to write for humans while keeping the search engines in mind. It’s a balance, sure, but it’s not hard. As long as you know the basic principles and adhere to them, you won’t have much trouble.
I’m no SEO guru by any stretch, but i do get a big chunk of my traffic from the big G, and I don’t see that changing.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
The real trick is doing behind the scenes stuff.
One thing that has made a huge difference was keeping Google from indexing any of the blog’s feeds, categories pages, and archive pages. That increased my search traffic by at least 30%. According to many Google gurus internal content duplication doesn’t cause much of a penalty, but I disagree entirely.
And I just recently installed a plugin called Another Wordpress Meta Plugin which lets you define each post’s meta tags as well as technorati-style tags with two simple fields, it will be interesting to see what effect it has.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:44 am
I made the same adjustment a few weeks back. I have had a traffic increase since then, though it’s hard to pinpoint if that’s the cause or not. For sure, it didnt’ hurt anything, and I’ll be doing it on any future blogs.