SEO Debates
If you follow many of The Debates About SEO you might find yourself confused. In the SEO world, keyword research is imperative, yet often it causes many bloggers to go overboard which can lead to what's called “keyword stuffing”. If you are confused by this jargon, don't be. My goal for this post is to assure you, that you absolutely do not need to use SEO in every circumstance.
I don't want to get off on the wrong foot by trying to convince you that learning search engine optimization is a waste of time. Knowledge is power and as a blogger, the more power you have the better. Learn all the SEO jargon you can, and give yourself a taste of it one chunk at a time whenever your schedule permits. Yet personally, after blogging for more than one year I find SEO to be the most boring, monotonous, and tedious aspects of the entire blogosphere. (Btw, searching for royalty free images is boring too, especially when you can't find the one you really want).
SEO Resources
At the very least, I'll share with you some resources that I consider to be the most interesting and compelling writers on the topic. Rest assured, each of these bloggers have such a smooth and easy-going writing style, that they will hold your interest and give you the most bang for your SEO buck:
WeBlogBetter – four of the best female bloggers on the planet: Kiesha, Tia, Evelyn and Jean joined by one fine young man Wayne. Right now Kiesha is holding a cash prize contest slash birthday party called the WeBlogBetter's Birthday Celebration Cash Giveaway!! and I'm proud to be one of the sponsors.
DiTesco – he's the expert, but like I said he'll keep you interested, and he gets right to the point!
Gail from Grow Map – if you have an online business, do yourself a favor and go to her site right now. Trust me.
Alex Whalley – is the man when it comes to generating traffic, and he's just plain old smart.
Mavis Nong is the Attraction Marketing diva
UPDATE: I also need to include Karl and Kelly Foxley – this dynamic duo has a very well respected internet marketing and search engine optimisation blog that is worth exploring. You can also find out about getting a Free SEO report too.
More Blogging Resources
Two awesome ladies you should check out for tips about blogging and guest blogging are Kristi Hines of Kikolani and Ann Smarty. And I can't neglect to mention these two additional resources that cover everything under the sun that's related to blogging resources: Justin from DragonBlogger and Hesham of Famous Bloggers.
I also have to give shout outs to my fellow BloggerLuv family member Mitch, because he inspired this post and to my friend Suresh who just started his SEOMMO Tips blog a few weeks days ago.
Just Blog!
Now that's taken care of. Let's talk about my experience with writing blog posts and getting organic traffic (didn't mean to slip that one in there – but “organic” means “traffic from search engines“).
One of the first blog posts I ever wrote was about my favorite college physics Professor Walter Lewin. I was very new to blogging and I wanted to share and express myself. Next, I wrote a post I thought would be funny called Do Twitter Backgrounds Attract Followers? A few month later I became a little more internet savvy. I began using Google Chrome and finding all of these fantastic extensions for chrome, in particular Readability.  These three posts continue to bring organic traffic (there's that word again) to Ms. Ileane Speaks everyday and I haven't written a post on that blog in almost two months. I didn't use any search strategies, or research any keywords, or read up on black-hat, or…well, you know what I mean (or at least you will after you visit a few of the links I just gave you).
In conclusion, if you want to blog without SEO, or you don't understand it, or if it simply bores the heck out of you, take a deep breath (or go do some yoga) and just blog!
Agree SEO is an art that takes time and can be boring but a little research of keywords is good before posting. Having the urls to search is fundamental.
But finding nice worthy images is worst 🙂
All the best,
Gera
Gera, I had to throw that one in about the images at the last minute. Probably because I had a hard time finding the right one for this post too! HA! Thanks.
Once you learn the SEO you can’t even think about posting without that. That’s the worse part, I guess. 😉
@Ileane You gotta be lucky! Else, give the keyword to the SE and pick one with eyes half closed.
I’m more into earning blog visitors via social networking- those from SEO can’t really please us much compare to our blogger friends can (unless you blogging for making money off only).
Interesting post. Thanks for sharing.
Hey Moonomo, I remember meeting you on Bloggers.com and that is a classic example of making use of social networking tools. I have to ask you if you are familiar with CommentLuv. CommentLuv is another great community for bloggers that I’m sure you will enjoy. It’s free to join and you can choose from your last 10 posts to link to on CommentLuv enabled blogs like this one. If you want more details about the benefits of CommentLuv you can read this post from my friend and link building specialist Growmap.
Thanks for the visit and the great comment!
The first visit I give them they were down to minimalistic due to the load they getting. It made me thinking again- what it does may could have done without any third-party API/services from a simple plug-in (fetching the latest post, in real time). I agree service like them gives a lots of benefit to the community and eventually it would done more great things, too.
I’ve to take some time to dig it more, will do hopefully soon. Thank you for stopping by my blog.
You are absolutely right!
You can’t argue about that one 😉
Thanks Ileane for mention, I’m honored.
SEO, I felt is something like razor blades, that shaves and makes your face clean so as to make you more presentable to the public world and using it too much causes scratches and rashes – it hurts man!
When new, one would try to learn everything and tweak whatever aspects he/she knows. The blog turns more coddy (better for search engines) and totally useless to human readers.
On the other hand never forget without SEO is something like giving a grand public speech among crowd with sound systems (nobody will hear you except the closest to you!)
[Note: Please Let me clarify, My blog SEO MMO Tips is just one week old]
Suresh, I like the analogy of the razor burns. HA!
I included your blog here because I predict it to go far in the world of SEO. In one week you are already building a strong foundation. As always, thanks for your support and comments.
I think there is some misconceptions about SEO here, Ileane. I think SEO does nothing harm. It’s genuinely good. SEO, which is like Marketing, is to make your blog post availability and findability to users. You know, like you create a very precious gem in the world. However, you can’t just sit and wait for the world to come to you. You have to come to the world first so that it can follow you.
No doubt that SEO is being made aweful by some marketers/bloggers out there but it’s a very natural process. With SEO, you’re just making your content more user-friendly.
Thanks Mike. Thanks for talking about the benefits of SEO, because I don’t talk about them too much in this post. Learning how to properly implement an SEO strategy takes time and research. Many times people get discouraged when they hit the SEO roadblock and I don’t want them to get discouraged and give up on it altogether. I find it more important to create good content and build SEO skills as you go. I provided links to those bloggers like Gail, DiTesco, Kiesha, Tia and the others to steer people in the right direction on their SEO journey. Thanks for your feedback.
Please, don’t take my analogy to abuse the virtue of SEO. Nobody can ignore and out-throw it. My meaning was ‘when you start to be super-conscious and try to implement everything everywhere, you’ll ceratinly produce counter effect’.
We choose SEO optimized theme, SEO pluggins and still pushing SEO harder up to the point where we decide wheter this word or that in title of post would bring more organic traffic! Up to this it was OK, but when I go through some GRAND suggestions of SEO Experts who offers me service with $XXX/month (cheapest) charges, I doubt – AM I BLOGGING?
Common, lets blog! Just make sure that you are not delivering a public speech without any sound amplifiers!
LOL, that’s a great attitude.:)
Hi Ileane,
You’ve compiled a great list of bloggers here who I have followed and can provide testimony to what you write is true. SEO is an exercise for those who aren’t attractive to the details of processes however, it’s necessary if you want to make heads turn in the long run. Moreover, the best way as you said is to blog naturally. Popularity of the moment beats the bore anytime.
Hi Thu. Welcome to Basic Blog Tips and it’s nice to meet you. I’m glad you like my list. I always feel like I’m leaving someone out when I make a list like that. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about SEO.
Hey Ileane… I went to a point where I’m trying to figure out how to manage my SEO in one post and thinking about it took me like 30 minutes. My finger was getting itchy to hit the Publish button, so I thought “what the hell, if I like my content as it is, I’m sure they will to”… and I’ll worry about the SEO later when I finally figure it out.
Hey Cindy, that’s the spirit! There’s plenty of time for SEO, in the mean time continue your networking efforts and creating good content. SEO isn’t going anywhere and learning it will come in due time. Thanks.
That’s what I often feel. You’ve shared my feeling.
Cindy, I wouldn’t spend to much time on SEO. All you need to worry about is keyword research, linking to authority sites and only just a few. Links to other articles on your site that are related. Also make sure you get yourself a good SEO plugin like All In One SEO. You may want to look into Scribe SEO and use Zemanata. I used at first and its an easy to learn what links are best to link to. Once you get good use to doing it, should only take about 5 or 10 minutes if they are short posts. maybe 20 if its a long post.
Hi James, thanks for your advice. It’s always great to have your input.
I think it’s the keyword research that can take up so much time, depending on what you’re looking for. Being focused is not as easy as it sounds.
I think that blogging without SEO, it will not be that challenging for me, also you can learn allot of stuffs in your way up. Also a good SEO optimization will bring you visitors and money.
I know that might come as a surprise but not everyone that blogs is trying to make money. But you’re right most of the time it does work that way. 🙂 By they way I have two tips for you that I think are more important than SEO, the first one is that you should sign up for an account with CommentLuv and the second one is that you should get a Gravatar, or be sure to use the same email address from your Gravatar profile when you leave comments on blogs such as this one as the little MonsterID. That way you can build your branding and your credibility. Many times I will make commenters as spam if they don’t have a proper Gravatar and I know that many other bloggers are doing this also. Doing these two things, will have a huge impact on your SEO strategy.
Hey Ileane,
Thanks so much for the mention. I agree that optimizing each post can be tedious. I balance SEO and writing for my readers. I do believe in making a conscious effort to maintain search engine ranking for certain key terms, and depending on the post, I may or may not optimize it for search engines.
Keyword research takes awhile (even with cool tools like Market Samurai) and at the end of the day, a keyword-rich title and body may not make for the best one. However, it can be done.
Scribe SEO is a great product. I have used it and believe it can make blogging with SEO a lot easier.
Cheers!
Tia
Hey Tia, It’s my pleasure to list you in this post. You always have a time saving tip up your sleeve. How much is Scribe SEO? I keep hearing about it but I don’t know the details. Thanks for the visit.
Ileane.. nice post with many great bloggers to learn from.
For me SEO isn’t so bad. If you do just a few of the basic simple steps, those alone will get you a nice return on your efforts.
But I do agree that SEO can be a mind numbing thing to learn and do haha
Even if all you did was write a title with a keyword, that alone would benefit your blog.
To make SEO even more of a pain in the butt, is people like GOOGLE changes the palying field on a monthly basis. what you know works today, may or may not work next month, on n on.. kinda annoying.
But stay to basic SEO tips and your blog will be better for it.
Hi John, I know Google has us jumping through hoops sometimes don’t they. As long as Google continues to improve our experience on the web we love them but when they make changes that give us headaches we start playing around with Yahoo! and Bing. But in the end we always come back. Thanks for the comment.
haha, I’m confused with the image, Ileane. 😀
You have the same point with me. I totally hate doing SEO on my posts as it is quite boring and I doubt in its effects. Some posts without SEO brought me hundreds of organic visitors each day whereas optimized ones are disappointing me. So, I also decided to make my posts natural and do not spend money to buy any SEO plugins.
Hope everything will be good. 🙂
Tek3D, have you ever practiced yoga? That’s the Warrior pose. 🙂 Thank you.
Hi Ileane,
As you mentioned, you don’t need to use SEO for every blog post. You might want to apply it here or there but overall it’s not a critical factor to consider if your readership is solid.
I feel that SEO plays a role in marketing your article only if you have zero readers.
When you can write informative, entertaining articles and network quite a bit you have no problem getting traffic, and that’s the main goal of SEO.
Thanks for sharing your insight.
Ryan Biddulph
Hey Ryan, I bet you never had zero readers on your blog. HA! Based on the post’s I’ve read on your blog they are always exactly what you described – informative and entertaining. I’ve enjoyed networking with you too. Thank you for commenting.
You do not always have to do SEO on every article. As long as you have good SEO plugins in place. But to be honest, how hard is to add links to authoritative sites such as wiki or other sites related to a term on your article, add in links to previous articles that might be important to your to your current articles. I find Keyword research is a bit harder and do not spend much time there unless its a very important articles that I think will bring in a lot of traffic. I find long tail keywords are easier and easy to rank on search engines.
I get most of my traffic from the search engine and I get a lot of it. Most of the articles that get that traffic are from on-page seo results. The article that I do almost next to no SEO do not get as much traffic and they take longer to rank. Generally with a mix of on-page and off-page SEO I can get a new article ranked/searched by google crawlers in about 45 minutes to 2 hours. The keywords that are more popular may take a couple of days and may only make to the second page.
Wow James. You have a lot of intelligence about your blog and it proves what I said in the post, knowledge is power. You have it down to a science. Thanks.
Hey, I got a link! As you’ve seen with your post, there are many differing opinions on its importance on blogs. In my opinion, I’d rather write a lot of posts than write one here and there because I get myself caught up on trying to perfectly optimize it. That’s pretty much the point of my post.
Mitch, I really got into that post and the guest post you did on DiTesco’s blog. I wanted to contribute to the debate and a realized that my response was an entire blog post. HA! That’s when you know you have good content. Your posts inspire me and that’s what I want to do when I blog – inspire folk. You’re awesome! Thank you so much.
Thanks; I try. 😆
Just blog! There could never be any better advice. You are my new guru from this moment on 🙂 Thanks for your kind mention and thanks for this right on post!
Hey Jean. Glad you like it and thanks for visiting. I think this is the first time someone called me a guru here. Sweet! 🙂
Great article Ileane!
Here is what I tell people who fear SEO. Shakespeare did not have a clue about SEO and is probably the best known and most respected author of all time. People “found” him the old fashioned way – through his superlative content, which has created a worldwide following.
There were other writers from his time that we have never heard of, because they were just not as talented and accomplished as Shakespeare.
The message here is to write to inform…to entertain…and to inspire. The rest will take care of itself. It certainly doesn’t hurt to throw a few wsell placed, descriptive keywords in your Blog posts – BUT NEVER FORCE THEM.
Marc LeVine
Director of Social Media
RiaEnjolie, Inc.
http://www.RiaEnjolie.com
Hi Marc, it’s funny that you use the example of Shakespeare. I didn’t understand or appreciate him when I studied his work in high-school. I think I was in my thirties before I realized what an impact he has on literature. I’ll probably appreciate SEO a bit more ten years from now too. 🙂 How ironic!
SEO ain’t what it used to be! I explain below and would like your feedback!
http://dave-lucas.blogspot.com/2010/09/blogosphere-stops-here-better-blogging.html
Hi Dave, I’ll take a look at your post soon. Honestly I’m not the best person to compare past and present SEO experiences with since I rarely use it. I have a question for you? Have you ever considered registering for CommentLuv? It would make it so much easier to share links to your relevant content on CommentLuv enabled blogs like this one. Let me know if you need help getting registered.
Personally, I’ve given up on SEO; I’m outsourcing it. However, if that doesn’t work out for one reason or another, i have no problem skipping it altogether.
Hey Dennis. Outsourcing SEO on business blogs is a great idea if you can afford to do it. Thanks for the advice.
Especially if you hate to do it, or don’t understand it, and yet, “it has to be done” blah blah blah. lol
Honestly, Ileane? I’ve consciously done one post with SEO in mind (see my CommentLuv link below.) The reason was that it was the ONE time I was seriously hoping to help others avoid a problem I was having.
The rest of my blog is just for fun. I rely on the social network to share my posts. When someone Stumbles, Tweets or links to a blog post, that tells me I did an okay job.
As many others have commented, focusing on content is probably more effective. After all, blogging platforms tend to be search engine friendly anyway, what with the pinging and trackbacks and hungry spiders 🙂
Cheers,
Mitch
Hey Mitch. Blogging is fun. I know that plenty of bloggers enjoy keyword research and use good anchor texts and so forth. Just because it bores me doesn’t mean others feel the same. I know that SEO has value and I always say to myself – when I grow up I’m going to start making the most of it. 🙂
I follow all of those SEO guys, and I say that you don’t have to worry about SEO in most cases. Just get a good wordpress SEO plugin that is set it and forget it, and you don’t even have to do keyword research or stuffing. Just remember to use your WordPress tags and put 5-10 keywords there. I recommend Greg’s High Performance SEO plugin, even over All in SEO Pack and SEO Platinum Pack.
Hi Justin, thanks for mentioning Greg’s High Performance SEO plugin. This is the first time I heard of it. There are so many plugins to choose from these days.
I haven’t come across that one either. Just as I was about to switch from All-in-One-SEO (the most popular SEO plugin) to Platinum SEO (more powerful), the Thesis Theme we use added even more SEO capabilities.
Now I’m not so sure that those of us using Thesis really need an SEO plugin and trimming plugins and reducing load time is something we may all want to seriously consider.
If anyone has a strong opinion or even some pros and cons of just using Thesis SEO without a plugin I’d love to hear from you.
Dennis, it looks like you get what you pay for with the Thesis theme. Thanks.
I’m pretty sure when I Tweeted this post that it got one of those Top Tweet icons on it. I hope it did. I’m so tired (4:51 a.m. now and still working) that my memory is fading.
Thank you for mentioning me. There is so much more we can do and we will do as soon as I get my latest commitments better organized.
You asked at BloggerLuv about anchor text links and I answered you over there but I forgot to mention that you can edit the links any time and make them better. I put the post that explains what words to link in CommentLuv in this comment.
Many who have been blogging much longer than you have still don’t clearly understand this concept. Only those who are SEOs usually know about it. Just this one thing can make a HUGE difference in your traffic and Alexa ratings and those of every blogger you ever link.
Hi Gail, thanks you so much for coming by. I can always count on you to provide useful tips and information on blogging best practices in very clear, concise language. That one tip, you just gave about using anchor text links, is explained thoroughly in your post, which is why I consider it one of my favorites. In a nutshell –
1. Find a keyword phrase you want to rank well for in search engines (like Google, Bing and Yahoo!)
2. Include that phrase in a sentence (naturally)
3. Create links to those specific words to your best content on the subject
Step number one (finding keywords and keyword phrases) is the part I always moan about. But once I get over that learning curve (in due time) steps 2 and 3 become very easy to accomplish on my own blog. I’ll stop there because your post on link building explains exactly what to do everywhere else on the internet.
Great thinking about organic SEO in this blog . I appreciate with your blog fully,so give inform me when you have update your blog. Thanks visit http://www.eluminoustechnologies.com/organic_seo.htm
I think SEO is an integral part of a blog you take that away from a blog and you loose huge chunk of visitors who could become your regular readers.For guys who give tutorials on any stuff ,SEO is must and they are sure to gain more readers.
Hi Biswajeet, nice to see you. Using SEO strategies can be beneficial for gaining traffic to a blog, but with the introduction of Google Instant many people are concerned with the possibility of loosing traffic and ranking if Google decides to change make more changes to their algorithm. If you take a look at the post The Debates about SEO I referred to you’ll see that Mitch talks about carefully studying the search terms that actually do bring traffic to your site. Many times (not always) you might be surprised to learn that what people are searching for has nothing to do with the keywords your trying to get attention from.
The point of my post here is that if you don’t have any content, you can’t evaluate where your traffic is coming from. My advice to anyone – newcomer or experienced blogger – is to build good content, network, and have fun with blogging. You can get traffic without using SEO, I know because I’ve done it. I also want to encourage people that might be confused about what to do next, that’s why I provided so many resources.
Wow Ileane, what an amazing resource you have put together!
It is a privilege to be included in such esteemed company, and part of an all round brilliant resource -with so many great references here.
On the note of references, can I just say that your summary of me was – well aw shucks, totally the best reference EVER! (my wife says not to encourage me though)
Really great post, tweeted – voted, stumbled, and all out loved.
And in conclusion, YOUR conclusion was just – well brilliant really – “In conclusion, if you want to blog without SEO, or you don’t understand it, or if it simply bores the heck out of you, take a deep breath (or go do some yoga) and just blog!”
hahahaaha – could not have put it any better myself (except replace yoga with golf or something 😉 )
Hey Alex, thanks for stopping by and showing so much support. I really appreciate it.
Hey Ileane, I think writing for human readers rather than search engines should absolutely be the first priority of any blogger. I mean, some bloggers don’t give enough credit to their readers, thinking they wouldn’t notice keyword stuffing and some weird phrasing that is intended for SEO.
I’m not trying to underestimate the importance of SEO, and I think that the right thing to do is leave the SEO to the end of the post writing routine: when writing an article, after you finish writing and proofreading, you can go over the text to see if some sentences or words can be rephrased (but not for the price of clarity to the readers).
Hi Omer, glad we are on the same wave length. Thank you for your input.
Great tip to just blog Ileane.
I have posts on my site that are optimized for the search engines because they have a specific job to do, ensure the page is highly targeted to people searching for a particular product or solution that is answered by the post.
Other posts are purely for visitors through other channels and our regular readers and the SEO on these (although still there) is not to the level where you’d expect to rank highly in the SERPs.
Additionally, someone who is good at SEO will have posts written in such a way that the human visitor will still be able to read the post as intended; after all, Google etc user-base are people searching and these are the people we are targeting with our pages (content) / products / services.
If you are just starting out in blogging then I recommend you blog first and learn SEO (and other important elements such as traffic generation and social media marketing etc) as you go along; otherwise you can find that all the information (a lot of it conflicting information) can be a stumbling block, causing a fear in newbies of getting it (blogging) wrong.
Warmest regards,
Karl
Karl, I need to edit this post to include the resources you have on your blog. I have learned so much from you and Kelly on FMSSEO and I have great deal of respect for you’re internet marketing and search engine optimisation advice. Thanks for reminding me of that. 🙂
Thank you Ileane, it means the world to us.
Keep your eyes open for a special post coming your way towards the end-of-the-week. That’s all I’m saying for now. 🙂
Karl, I’m not sure I can wait patiently. By Wednesday, I’ll be going nuts. 🙂 Thank you for everything.
Sorry Ileane, I said towards the end of the week and it actually turned out to be the end of the week. Better late than never and long over due.
Just follow the CommentLuv link. 🙂
Karl, I am left speechless by that post. Thank you for saying wonderful things about me and Basic Blog Tips! I can only hope that we continue to have so much mutual admiration for each other. You and Kelly are totally awesome!
You are more than welcome Ileane and the post has gotten some lovely feedback from those that have read it.
It was funny because John at BloggerLuv had the same idea and did a great post about you over there.:)
Really sound advice! It’s important to remain true to the function of blogging. Basic understanding of SEO can go along way, but its like drinking beer. Do it in moderation and avoid the hangover. 🙂
Donnie, I like that analogy.:) Thanks.
You need SEO and you need to make profit from everything if you want to be really successful.
SEO is definitely boring, but in the long run it’s important, because social media traffic will only get you so far.
Hi Eric, I’m glad you agree that SEO is boring, at least social networking is fun 🙂
Take that back! 😉 I have to admit you have to really love SEO to read about it everyday, practice it everyday and work on it most days. I love keyword research… (that sounds really sad but hey, it’s true)… I guess I’m just expressing my inner-geek because I just can’t get enough of all that ‘algo’ 🙂
Useful resources shared, really SEO is interesting if you know what you are doing and you are doing it correctly but its takes time which is really limited, effort, patience and experience..
Hi Ileane,
I agree that sometimes NOT making SEO a focus is great for a site. Although, I’ve actually found that one of the best SEO tactics is to forget SEO when you initially put your content together… sounds a little odd, I know. But putting the Google bots to one side and writing for your HUMAN audience produces higher quality content. You can always go back after the first draft and make tweaks from an on-page SEO perspective.
Google wants to return the highest quality and the most relevant content for a search term… so give it what it wants – Create great quality and relevant stuff and you’ve got a great foundation.
Love this post 🙂
Hi Stacey, welcome to Basic Blog Tips! Great point. You can always go back and “make tweaks” as you grow and learn what keywords searches are popular. As you continue to visit the resources I linked to, or others that you trust, you can make comments, ask questions and learn by example. One day, you’ll have that “A HA” moment and SEO will start to make sense.
I tried it for sometimes.. but SEO helps alot to bring traffic.
SEO is important and even if you don’t understand it, you have to take some time to relax and really try to make yourself understand.
To be a highly successful blogger SEO is a must.I think we should devote certain amount of time each day or week,trying to learn the fundamentals of SEO.A lot of hype is surrounding SEO.A lot of people do not know the relation between website loading page and google rankings.Google has publicly announced that slower loading sites are not optimized for search engines.I believe it is an ever evolving game and keeping up with the latest info on this regard is very essential 🙂
As a web designer I know better than to skip the SEO other my throwing in a title, description, and keywords that quickly come to mind in 5 minutes. I think it is just a time issue. It is always one of those things I would like to take a day and really SEO some posts/pages and do some keyword research but that day never comes.
Hey Melinda, thanks for your input.
Wonderful post, Ileane. SEO is important if you want your blog to be seen, but if you’re not blogging because you’re afraid you’re not doing it right, then you should just go ahead and blog. I know we get traffic for all sorts of terms we hadn’t planned on; it’s not targeted, but it is nonetheless good stuff. Most blogs will cover the topics they’d like to rank for anyway, which makes SEO for them a little easier!
Hi Ileane
less or more I could agree with you that SEO is boring but SEO can be interesting if we know how to tackle it. For me SEO is all about keyword and linking. We as a blogger should know a little bit about SEO
Hi Fazreen, I’m really glad to see you here. Thanks for the visit and thanks for the comment too.
I feel that this is a tad silly. Shouldn’t it be the same thing? or rather, its a process- write the blog post, then optimize it.
Great post, Ileane!
Even as an SEO, I have to agree with you, that SEO needn’t be considered that important for the majority of bloggers. Perhaps for those that are depending upon a monetized blog for their sole source of income, and seeing substantial cashflow, it’s different. For a site that is a money-maker, I see SEO as a necessity.
That said, with some great plug-ins like All-in-One-SEO and Platinum SEO available, a partially effective, automated process can be implemented, and nearly forgotten about. The setup is really pretty simple, at least with All-in-One… I haven’t tried Platinum, and the benefits are many. 😉
Hey Doc, thanks for the advice. I installed the SEO Ultimate plugin on this blog and I really like plugins that can do some of the SEO work for me.
Keyword stuffing can be easy to overlook. I tend to write my article without using keywords and then review it and add them carefully being sure not to overdue it. Grant
Hey Grant, welcome to Basic Blog Tips! I look forward to visiting your blog too. Thanks for your input.
SEO is indeed important, but I have to cite the part I liked the most about your article:
“Just Blog!”
Amen.
Hi Gabriele, only a true blogger can understand where I’m coming from. Thank you my friend 🙂
Hi Ileane and many thanks for the mention. I will have to move this discussion up a notch and give my two cents about SEO.
1) What you said about knowledge is very true. It is power, however many people do not understand that without taking action is absolutely useless.
2) SEO is boring. Indeed, but it really depends on what your objectives are. If you are blogging for money then it is something that you should not ignore. If you are more in to just the “blogging for fun” stuff then justins suggestion should be good enough. Also, depending on your theme and platform, this should take care of your SEO almost automatically. In addition if you are relatively active on social networks, commenting, etc, this should give you some traffic.
4) Everything your write and words you use are keywords in essence. The point is are they optimized for search engines? This is really the key to good SEO, nothing more.
Anyway, I thing that SEO is a “necessary boring thing” but that’s my take 🙂
DiTesco, 🙂
Even your comments are interesting and thought provoking. Thanks for making the big distinction between having knowledge and taking action based on what you know. Earlier today I watched a module on Lynda.com about Google Analytics and the same point was stressed by the instructor. He was talking about the referring traffic and some other tracking stats and he stressed the same point about taking action, based on the intelligence you gather from GA, that will improve chances of reaching your target goals.
Have a great weekend!
Hi,For me SEO matters a lot..Its in demand these days and people are moving towards it..
SEO does matter, but content is key. So as long as you are blogging around a cohesive theme, Google is going to love your content, recognize your theme, and send you visitors who are looking for the information you are writing about!
Hi Jennifer, welcome to Basic Blog Tips and thanks for your feedback.
I think it’s an advantage to blogger to have an idea about SEO specially if they want to earn more from their blog.
Yes, seo services, if your blogging goal is income, then SEO is a mission you must take on. However, a great number of bloggers have no interest in monetizing their blogs. I was listening to an interview the other day with Louis Gray. He’s a very well known blogger who describes his extremely popular blog as “Home for early adopters, technology geeks, RSS addicts and Mac freaks. (May also occasionally contain some TiVo, media, sports and politics…)”
Louis is the current VP of marketing for my6sense and has a long list of start-ups (including MyLikes) on his resume. In the interview with Joe Hackman, Louis stated how he does not monetize his blog and I found that very encouraging. However, to your point, I’m sure he has plenty of SEO knowledge under his belt 🙂
I think seo can be a good tool if you have a good keyword that is useable.
Leslie
Hi Leslie, looks like you have this keyword thing down to a tee. 🙂
Well, what I would say that here were taking SEO vs Blogging (without SEO).
If we think society point of view then SEO is not so good, if you are a good blogger and you are writing keeping SEO terms in your mind then it would allure you to use keywords in description, heading, body, in last para etc. then you have to make them bold, italic etc..
This way you are not helping the society as you are not writing for the people you are writing for the search engine mainly.
So writing for the people would be beneficial for the society but here is the main point that how your post would be found by the people.
However, some words or phrase are also searched in search engine if it is fresh content, and once the visitors visited your site they would become the repeated visitors of your site if you have provided quality.
this is an excellent concept about SEO. I am so much thankful to you.
Hey Ileane,
I must say I enjoyed reading this blog all the way through. For me though, I think the longer you blog the more natural it becomes of you to integrate SEO with it. Isn’t that the beauty of blogging that separates it from traditional Journalism?
Ward
Hey Ward, nice observation about SEO being natural. But I’m a fan of traditional journalism too and I think the beautiful them that separates it from blogging is WordPress now SEO. 🙂
Blogging without SEO is like when you are in a class, physically present but mentally absent. I guess, there’s nothing wrong with SEO. It’s good actually. SEO is one of the strategies of online marketing, its purpose is to make your blog post available to people when they search something in search engines that somehow relates to your blog.
This is such a great thought regarding that SEO thing. I think SEO is a good tool if you just know how to twist its functions.
I miss the old days when blogging was simple and fun, but nowadays you need to think of so many things that it just becomes tedious. SEO is not just boring, it’s also complicated and time consuming. Sometimes is also useless, because if you write quality and interesting content you can, from time to time, achieve the same results and still enjoy it.
This is some thing unique thanks for sharing
Very informative post thanks for sharing i was finding such type of contents
Hi Allen, that’s a great point. There are several different ways to optimize your content for search engines. I love commenting on good blogs.
Weblogbetter is a great site. I am always check out their site to see what they are saying next
I am confused with the SEO do’s and don’ts. Some sites say do do with it blogging and some say blog without SEO, ugghh frustrating. I will give this a shot and see if it works, hopefully
So cool ! It’s good content I like your site.
Thanks for the visit and the nice comment!
I totally agree with Dexter. I am so confused with the dos and don’t that seo experts advice. I don’t know who to follow. As what I have checked all of them are really great SEO consultants. I am reading their blogs to really know more about SEO because I want to try this stuff.
I don’t know who to follow. As what I have checked all of them are really great SEO consultants.
Ya sure I agree with you that one’s shouldn’t follow misguiding tips in search of SEO knowledge. We should read concept from certified site’s. As well as you asked that after a year’s blogging a flogger get up tired, So i have a little bit confusion that if he use proper theory with interesting topics, he won’t feel so. thanks for nice post
I am currently planning on making a new web site for a hotel with reservation capabilities. I am debating if I need a company to built the whole site and then SEO it or just built the site myself and then have a SEO company look at it? I dont want to spend an excessive amount on PPC campaigns and need organic listings for the marketing end.
This is the perfect blog for anyone who wants to know about this topic. You know so much its almost hard to argue with you (not that I really would want&HaHa).I hope you will continue to work hard, I would often visit here.
Hi Ileane. I’ve came around this post after reading the guest post of James Pruitt and your article submitted to Comluv with the same topic.
I can say now I am new in the biz and will run my blog soon enough. I’ve gotten so dizzy trying to understand SEO and SMO. However I’ve learned a bit and hope it will help, but it is definitely relieving to find out it’s not a MUST to know that in order to get some “attention”.
Thank you and your guest, the information you’ve offered has been of high value for me.
Keep it up! ^^
Hi Andreea, In the early stages SEO can be confusing and intimidating. Consider it an advanced skill and follow a few simple steps like using WordPress on and self-hosted domain, getting keywords in your blog title if possible, and most certainly use keywords in your post titles. As you continue to blog, you will pick up on more SEO skills and you can always come or visit James’ blog when you have questions. Thanks for commenting!
I think Im going to do Seo for my site myself. I have seen different software programs online to assist in this. I would like recommendations on the best software people have ha experience with. I am inexperienced with this and need software that can submit articles etc.
Nice tips shared by you so i like it very much so thanks for sharing them.
I don’t know who to follow. As what I have checked all of them are really great SEO consultants.
I am happy when reading your blog with updated information! thanks alot and hope that you will post more site that are related to this site.
I think a well constructed blog post that is full of useful information or entertains will gain links and the SEO work will be done for you naturally. Building a following is key. From there on it can be down to your readers to do the rest.
I think SEO does not matter if you are well established already….
Nice tips you have shared bro. Thank you. Very helpful!
Nice posting. I am willing to do SEO for my own sites. I think this post will support more in this case because i got some new idea and after reading this post i also generate my own ideas . This all created goes to your post. i am looking forward to see more related to increase the rank of the site and traffic also as well. thanks for spreading these all.
Blog comment is a work of SEO.But I think Im going to do Seo for my site myself. I have seen different software programs online to assist in this.I have checked all of them are really great SEO consultants.
That is a really good bit of information you have written up there, I really think you have a nice site here. Thanks
Ileane you say very right before reading your article i am too much confused to understand just these three words SEO but now you help me very well in a very professional way i read your article and now a days i also do more concentration on blog making.
Nice post. I was checking continuously this blog and I am impressed! Extremely useful information specifically the last part 🙂 I care for such info a lot. I was looking for this certain information for a very long time. Thank you and best of luck
Now I am more confused about SEO. I do understand that as a blogger you don’t need to be distracted by all the SEO stuff, but it is still important or necessary?
Weblogbetter is such a great site. I read that one a lot but I’m curious to check out the other ones you mention as well. I’ll be sure to look at ’em. 🙂
If i say that SEO is the heart of blogging,then it is not wrong.
What you people say?
By the way,this article is good and will pray for you to write more awesome like that!!
Thanks!
A lot of great web enthusiasts are being mentioned here. Good job Ileane I am honored to visit your blog, I have fun with your readings. All are worth sharing.
Hello,
It’s a nice posting. This is really a well-developed blog. I have acquired much knowledge from it. I think your idea is both outstanding and educative.
Thanks for the post.
Agree with the fact that posting new quality posts is a must to make sure your content is interesting, fresh and relevant to your readers. I have to say though it is pretty hard coming up with new ideas and content all the time. I see some great and professional bloggers around and truly admire their determination, hard work and creativeness. Great post.
After blogging for more than one year you find SEO to be the most boring, monotonous, and tedious aspects of the entire blogosphere.