SEO Is A “Practice” Like Medicine, Not A Science
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 1, 2010
Every Wednesday on Twitter there’s something that goes on that originated here in the Syracuse area. It’s called Community Manager Chat, and it’s actually geared towards people who handle the social media processes at their particular companies, or for someone else. I get to be a part of it because social media is my thing, or at least a big part of my thing. If you ever decide to participate it’s at 2PM Eastern time, and you use the hashtag #cmgrchat to follow along.
 |
Last Wednesday the topic of discussion was blogging, which y’all know I thrive on. It was actually the second week on the topic because it seemed like it was very popular and there were so many questions being asked. I answered a bunch of questions, and on that day and the day after I got a bunch of new followers; I could see that a lot of people were interested in what I had to share.
Anyway, what happens is that one of the moderators throws out a question every 15 minutes or so, then the responses fly out. One of the questions asked what people did for SEO (search engine optimization) on their blogs. I stated that my SEO strategies are to write as much content as I can and to, for the most part, write about certain types of topics more often than going off the grid. I actually do that if you check my centennial stat posts from time to time.
As normal, there were a few people who went into the direction of having to not only write niche blogs, but to make sure to stuff your posts with keywords and keyword phrases so they could be found easier on the search engines. I read that stuff all the time and for the most part I think it’s garbage. After all, if I write 100 posts on roses and suddenly decide to stuff a post with the phrase “brown picture frames”, it’s not really going to mean anything to anyone, including the search engines. Those 100 posts on roses are going to fare way better.
After seeing some of those posts, I wrote the line that this post is based on: SEO is a “practice” like medicine, not a science. It got retweeted a bunch of times; I think people liked that phrase a lot.
And of course I believe it’s true. There are a lot of great SEO practices, which I’ve even talked about on this blog, but the truth is that not every website is going to end up on the first page of Google or any other search engine just because one’s site is optimized well. If you decided today that your goal was to be in the top 10 for the term “shoes” you probably won’t have a chance unless you can produce close to 900 pages of blog posts in a year or so. That’s because there are so many people already writing on that same topic that have beaten you to the punch. You can get creative to find your little niche in that group and that might put you on the first page; otherwise, you just need to be the best you can be and hope to compete in another way.
SEO is like medicine because it’s really a guessing game after a certain point. Doctors guess all the time as to what’s wrong with us. I bet every person who reads this post knows someone who had a doctor tell them “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” or something to that effect. I’ve heard it myself. And these people go to school for 8 years, then do 2 or 4 years of clinical before they’re allowed to be out on their own; I don’t know anyone who’s truly been doing SEO for more than 7 years or so.
Does this mean one shouldn’t try to be as effective as possible in trying to get their blogs to perform well on the search engines? Absolutely not. What it does mean is that one shouldn’t kill themselves trying to write the perfectly optimized post every time out. To me, based on history, one gets way more juice by trying to put out as much good content as they can. That’s always my goal when I decide to write a post, no matter what the topic is on.
Trust me, there’s really nothing wrong with practicing; you might not end up being a concert pianist like Andre Watts, but you could be Liberace, and he made a lot of money in his lifetime.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
The Debates About SEO
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 10, 2010
Search engine optimization is an interesting concept, one that I’ve been dealing with for almost 4 years now. It’s interesting because you never really know where discussions on the topic are going to take you, and often people love to disagree on things concerning different aspects of it.
 by the mad LOLscientist |
I recently wrote a guest post about this subject on another blog. My general premise is that people shouldn’t be stressing themselves out about using all sorts of SEO tactics when it comes to blogging because it’s better to make your content look smooth and sound seamless than it is to worry about too much of the SEO involved in trying to get people to your blog. In my view, you don’t totally throw out SEO, but don’t overly worry about it because, for blogs, it’s not as important as the breadth of your content if you’re a niche blogger.
Of course I encountered disagreements on the post, which I kind of expected, because there are many others who would say I was stark raving mad for saying that. However, I stood my ground. Based on research and real evidence, if you have at least 100 blog posts on a subject all the SEO sculpting in the world isn’t going to make a blog post stand out from any other in the search engines. Having a consistently good pattern of writing on your niche will work wonders, though.
An interesting way to show this is to look at this blog’s top 10 keywords from January of this year through August 31st for how people found this blog on search engines and see if the posts they might match up to were all that optimized. Here we go:
1. Cleavage – well, that’s still my most popular post for some reason, but in a post that was almost 1,350 words I used that one word less than .7%, even if it’s in the title.
2. Ultra Diamonds complaints – I wrote one post about this back in 2008 and I mentioned it twice, and not even in a row.
3. sensors quality management scam – I’ve never written a single post on this topic, and I have no idea what it even means. I wrote a post on secret shopper scams, and someone wrote that line in a comment.
4. forcefield.exe – mentioned once in a post I wrote about Zone Alarm.
5. do they still make zima – I wrote that comment once in a post on, well, Zima.
6. pdf my url – I wrote a post on this software, but I used the term “pdf” twice and “url” three times.
7. favorite classical pieces – I wrote a post on my favorite classical pieces, but I only used the phrase once, not including the title.
8. obsession with numbers – This is the first post where, as I look at it now, one could say I optimized it, although it certainly wasn’t intentional.
9. google desktop thunderbird – This one is also inadvertently optimized, and when I look at it, probably very well indeed.
10. mystery shoppers corp scam – once again this phrase doesn’t show up anywhere in the post I wrote on secret shoppers, and I have no idea where the word ‘corp’ comes from.
What’s my point? Out of my top 10 keywords, only two posts are actually optimized, and that occurred because of natural writing rather than any attempt to provide proper SEO to the posts. And the two posts that are optimized are #8 and #9 on my list; how do we explain the top 7?
As I said and will reiterate, I’m not saying that if you wish to take the time to do it that going through the process of optimizing your content might not be a worthy goal? What I’m saying is that, at least in my opinion, writing your content so that it makes sense to your readers, and eventually search engines, seems to work just as effectively if your topic in some way matches up to what people are looking for. At least for blogs; we can talk about websites another time, unless you read the article I just linked to. lol
Or I could be wrong… nah! 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
All In One SEO – Testing
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 16, 2008
On occasion I’ve mentioned this WordPress plugin called All In One SEO. It’s supposed to help blogs with their search engine optimization goals. I first added the plugin back in May, I believe, so it’s had some time to do its thing with posts after that. Let’s see how things have gone for me.
I figure that a good month to look at is August. We know that there was a page rank update in late September, and since I’d been running the program for a few months at that point, it should have been able to do something with some of those posts, or so I’m thinking.
What do we find? Unfortunately, at this point I’m not a good endorsement for the program. Out of 16 posts for the month, 15 of those posts are totally unranked. One of the posts is ranked at 0 out of 10, which is supposedly better than being totally unranked, but not by much.
I do know how to use the All In One SEO program. For those unfamiliar with it, you have the option of leaving areas blank and letting the program take over, or adding in some words and having the program help to enhance whatever you’ve stated. The three areas you get to write something in are Title, Description, and Keywords. If you leave them blank, the program is supposed to take care of it for you, though I’m not sure how it knows what to do.
Anyway, I thought that was somewhat interesting, but I wanted to try to be even more fair. So I went through all the posts for both June and July, and even thought to take a look at September, when comment started to grow. Nothing, nada, zip. I really wasn’t expecting anything for September, but one would think that at least one of my posts would have even a zero; nope.
Now, what I have done is gone into Google and looked up some of my titles, and they do show up on the search engines. But since I write my titles, one would expect that they’d show up, so that’s not really much of a test.
So, what does this tell me? Is the All In One SEO program at fault because it’s not doing what I was hoping it would do, or am I at fault for not purposely taking more time in making sure that whatever I’m writing about has lots of keywords to help it generate them? In other words, am I supposed to write keyword rich content for SEO purposes to help the program help me do the same thing? Isn’t that kind of like cleaning up the house before the cleaning lady arrives?
One more caveat. I agree with my friend Sire that page rank isn’t all that some people want to make it out to be. SEO tactics obviously may not always result in high page rankings, and that’s not really the purpose either. If your page is ranked badly but you still get visitors, that’s always a much more important metric. Still, I do go to some blogs where a post has a page rank, so I’m thinking it’s not supposed to be impossible. At least my site has a page rank of 3, so I’ll accept that for the time being.
Just wondering if my expectations of All In One SEO are legitimate, and, as a last thought, did I say the name All In One SEO enough times to get a page rank on this one?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
