Blogging, be it about your homestead, bad poetry, space travel, or your funny old uncle, is a two part process. First you write it (you want it read, right?), then you publish it (you want it read, right?). Simple, right?
Well, the “writing it” part is simple (simple, not easy), but the publishing part has a few little quirks that keep it from being simple or easy. No matter how good you write, no matter how interesting that topic, the hard truth is that the blogosphere is a large and densely populated place. Getting your stuff read can be a complicated process. If you write an article about homestead egg laying chickens and someone Goggles “homestead egg laying chickens” your blog post should pop right up, right?
Not exactly Grasshopper. If you Google “homestead egg laying chickens” you’ll find that there are over 48,000 other articles on the web on that topic. Narrow your search a bit and add the word “breeds” to the search and you’ll cut the articles to choose from down to just over 26,000. I don’t know about you, but my eyes start crossing if I have to scroll past about the second page of results.
If I wanted to give you the ins and outs, the ups and downs, of everything that makes a blog post findable I could probably fill a book…or several…on the subject. The fact is the list of books, articles, white papers, and entire blogs devoted to the intricacies of making a blog post findable is a very, very long list. I’m not going to get down in the weeds attempting to explain things I know nothing about, like Google search algorithms and search engine optimization minutia. What I hope to do is show you a very un-SEO, and simple, way to deal with SEO (Search Engine Optimization)if .
First let’s get a few things out of the way that will affect your search results but that you can do nothing about. This information falls under “nice to know”, not “need to know”.
What you call your blog does not really matter, but how long you’ve been calling it that does. Search engines look at your blog every so often (the more traffic your blog gets, the more often it gets “crawled”) and they notice how long your blog has been around. Being around a long time does not carry a lot of weight with the search engines, but it does carry some. With that in mind, if you ever get tired of, bored with, or irritated at your blog do not drop your domain name or blog hosting unless you’re absolutely sure you won’t be starting it back up. Whatever longevity advantage you had will disappear.
Another item that has a small, but existent, affect on you’re findability is how long your domain name is registered for…the longer the better. If you’re just starting at blogging, register your domain name for a year, just to see if you’re gonna keep it up, but after a year register that sucker for as long as you can. Again, it doesn’t make a big difference but it does make a difference.
Now, let’s talk about the things you can control. You can control what you write, what title you give it, what web address it carries, what key words you use, how you tag it, and a good number of other items that can make or break the “findability” of a blog post or page.
Right here let me address two things that you should not do regarding SEO.
First, do not write “for” SEO…write for yourself. Enjoy it. Have fun. Make your computer your friend, and then have a one sided “conversation” with that friend.
I sometimes find it very easy to have one side conversations even with living friends…ask some of them.
If you’re writing about homesteading, or keeping up the online journal, or writing poetry, or just BS’ing in general about every topic in the world like I tend to do, you better enjoy it, you better have fun, or you’ll quit, and we wouldn’t want that, now would we?
After you’ve written what you WANT to write, and after it you come up with a catchy title that you WANT, then, and only then, go back and do the un-SEO thing. It might mean that you need to tweak your writing a little (less and less the more you write) or it might not. It might mean that you need to tweak your catchy title a little (less and less the more titles you write) or it might not. In other words, always remember, you are writing for a reader, NOT a search engine. You are ADJUSTING for a search engine.
The second thing you should not do is expect instant results, for a couple of reasons.
First, remember that I told you the search engines “crawled” web domains with varying frequency. Some web addresses get “crawled” several times a day…but those are sites, like news sites, with a high volume of fresh content daily, or sites with high visitor volume (several thousand daily visits), or both. I don’t fit either profile (yet!) and you probably don’t either…but we’ll get there with the un-SEO.
Second, SEO, even un-SEO, takes a bit of getting used to. It’s a bit like using voice recognition software for blogging (we’ll talk about MVR later) in that the more you use it the more you get used to it. First attempts will be good, but with regular use they will be great!
Now…the hook…
If you’ve read my advertising policy (see the little tab at the top of the page?) you know that I advertise NOTHING that I don’t own and use…and I owned it and used it before deciding to endorse or advertise it…and I own and use Blog Post Engineering, the un-SEO. I’ve been using it for a few months now and I can honestly say that it is the best money I’ve spent on JuicyMaters.com…except the domain name and web hosting…since JuicyMaters was born.
Even at that, I’m not going to ask you to spend $xx.xx to buy it (Don’t complain about the $xx.xx…just know it’s reasonable and I’ve gotta leave the author room for possible future price increases without me having to remember to come back and update this post. I know I’D charge more if I had written it)…
No…I’m not going to ask you to buy it. What I would like you to do if you write for the web, or are thinking about writing for the web, and want your words to be read, is to click on that Blog Post Engineering ad over there in the right sidebar…
See it?…Right there…Yeah, that’s it…
…and go on over to the author’s website and let him tell you a bit more about it.
Then, if you think it will improve the findability of your blog…and ONLY if you think it will do so…spend the $xx.xx (a pittance, really) and get BPE, the un-SEO.
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