I hear a lot of excuses from people when it comes to why they don’t blog all that often. Although I tend to believe that people have more to say than they think they do, I can understand how someone might think they’ll run out of things to say.
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What I also hear is that people have no idea how to write for search engines, or the all-important SEO. I thought it was time to address the question of just how important SEO is to your blogging content.
Is SEO important? Yes, it’s absolutely important. How important it is in one’s blogging content is a different question entirely.
There are times when making sure that certain keywords are prominent in a blog post. One of the benefits of blogging is the fact that you’re actually building up prominence for your topics, or keywords that you want to be known for, by having a lot of content rather than having to keep drilling down on specific keywords or keyword phrases. So you shouldn’t have to go out of your way to create those keywords or keyword phrases if you know what you’re talking about.
For instance, even though I’m using the term SEO often in this particular post, if I decided to only use it once in any other post and linked that one time to something else on either my blog or my website, it would have as much power for my website as mentioning it in one post multiple times. The fact is that I have written on the topic multiple times on this blog throughout the years, so I should be covered, especially if someone’s wondering how it might relate to blogging.
In other words, the SEO properties of a blog don’t have to occur all in one post. One can spread out the process via multiple posts. That also means that your content can read naturally for both your visitors and the search engines, which is what everyone wants to see anyway.
Of course you will probably go somewhere else and read where someone has said how important it is to make sure that every single post you write is perfectly optimized. I’ve read lots of blog posts where they’ll tell you how many times you need to use certain phrases, that you need to add H1, H2, H-etc tags, and a whole lot of other tricks. Go find some of the big time blogs and check to see how often they’re employing these tricks within the articles; almost never!
I’m here to tell you that it’s much more important having consistent content than worrying about how you’re writing something. As long issue make it readable for your visitors, make it compelling, and have a style worth reading, your content and your search engine optimization processes will take care of themselves.
The whole idea of keywords puts me in a state if overwhelm. The experts say to stay away from popular keywords because you don’t have a chance of ranking. They also say don’t use keywords that aren’t popular. So, you end up somewhere in the middle. The whole idea of SEO is ever changing. Good I have someone like you Mitch to keep me abreast of these changes. Happy stepping! ;-p
Thanks Steve. I think SEO is important but some folks will read those articles and overdo it within a particular post such that it reads stupidly. I like to try to keep some perspective on it all. Course, that means I have to go against your experts who say to stay away from popular keywords, as that’s a stupid concept also. No one owns any particular keyword forever.
Hi Mitchell, many newbie bloggers dont understand the importance of internal linking and linking to relevant places. You make a good point that using keywords in multiple posts and then linking them when it makes sense.
It is important to get some traffic organically and doing some SEO homework will surely help.
I love using the Yoast plugin, it makes it easier to do.
Lisa, believe it or not I have that Yoast plugin on this blog… but no idea how to use it. lol So I’ve never bothered with it; I just keep writing and, whenever possible, linking back to previous articles as my biggest SEO feature. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll figure that plugin out.
Hi,
You are right. I don’t spend much effort on SEO. I am just using the basic wordpress plug in for SEO and trust me it is working. I don’t have much traffic from search but I can see a decent number of people coming from organic search.
That’s the way to get things going, and I’m sure you’ll continue growing if you stick with your strategy.
Even I never care about SEO much..
I just installed SEO by Yoast plugin, which do SEO better than me for my site.. 🙂
Still I wanna say that, Search Engine Optimization is very important, if we target many organic visitors.
Thyrone, SEO really is important, yet I think some folks are willing to do some weird stuff to try to make it work. In today’s world, just making sure your message is clean can do wonders.
Hey Mitch, that’s exactly why I have so many Hot Sports Babes post. I want to keep it fresh in Google’s mind as well as improving the SEO for that term.
Like all that many other folks are shooting for that term lol
Either way it would me nicety be up top for a change. I’m currently on page one but down the bottom
Mitch Mitchell
You make a good point that using keywords in multiple posts and then linking them when it makes sense.
It is important to get some traffic organically and doing some SEO homework will surely help.
Thanks; I try. Yes, learning a little bit about SEO couldn’t hurt anyone.
Yes I also agree to be optimizing your posts with keywords and doing inner linking. Connecting your posts with each other makes it a good sign for Search engine crawlers to crawl your site more frequently. This only applies to quality content, spammy content is out of the question.