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This is the second guest post by Karen from Blazing Minds. She’s a recording artist with the Electronica Duo band Remergence and a top-notch blogger. Karen’s blog is DoFollow.
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We all consider the SEO of our blogs and I have personally found that sometimes it takes a lot effort to find those correct keyword and or key phrases to add in to your blog post to try to produce those magic results for the search engines to pick you up and give you a good SERP.
Then you have to work on which search engines you want higher rankings on and work on producing your posts to gain better SERP in each engine. But, is this really that important, isn’t there something else you should be considering as well, your readers!
Take into consideration that it is your blogs readers that bring you the traffic and by keeping in contact with them via replying to their comments and finding out what your readers are saying as well as what they are searching for also helps with the overall way that your blog is purveyed.
Ok, so I know that a lot of bloggers will say, “keep to your niche” but, what if you enjoy blogging about anything and everything, I know I do, so I look at my stats in WordPress and see what everyone is looking for and usually go from there with my ideas for a blog post and recently I don’t try to go to over the top with searching for those magically keywords, I now have the tendency to look for related searches in Google and go from there and since doing this my hits from Google have improved as those of you who read my blog will have noticed from the weekly round-up that I post.
So at the end of the day my recommendation is listen to your readers, communicate with them via the comments they leave and find out what they find interesting, your blog stats will show the posts that get more hits than others, check those out and see what caused them to get more traffic/comments than others and use this information to improve your overall blogging.
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- An Introduction From Karen @ Blazing Minds (ileane.wordpress.com)
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- Shout Out To My Top 10 Commentators On Blazing Minds (blazingminds.co.uk)
ms. ileane speaks 
SEO is not important than readers, but SEO is one way to show readers the way to your blog!
Hi Hesham, thanks for commenting, that’s one of the reasons I still do SEO, but I don’t go mad for it 😉
I always try to manage both SEO and readers simultaneously. And it works for me! I don’t stuff my posts entirely with keywords, but a few to make it search friendly too. Nice post Ileane. Its now going on Blogging Junction Smashing Saturday!
I always think that balance is very important, a posts stuffed with keywords is just so obvious and a visitor will see this and be put off a blog and it’s posts.
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It’s my strongly held opinion that what every blogger ought to be aimed at is becoming adept at basic SEO, and also adept at forming relationships and building a blog centered community.
I don’t find much value in black or white and/or this or that mutually exclusive arguments. If any blogger does not want to use keywords in titles and subtitles that accurately describe their post contents, and also does not wish to assign relevant categories and tags to their posts then that’s their prerogative. Any attempts to make it sound as though has to make one choice or the other by rating either use of SEO or readers as more important is nonsensical because the two are not mutually exclusive.
It’s a fact is is that you can have the best content in the blogosphere but if it cannot be found by potential readers using search engines then your readership will not grow.
Another fact is that if you do not value the readers you do attract and respond to their comments as quickly as you can they may not return to read your posts or subscribe to your blog.
A third fact is that the ratio of blog visitors to comments on most blogs is 100 or more visitors will produce only a single comment. So it’s common sense that bloggers ought to value the comments receive and respond to them ASAP as Karen suggests above.
A fourth fact is that many bloggers do have real lives and lack the time required to spend online chatting here there are everywhere on social media and social network sites. What we are witnessing is many blogger who leap frog from site to site all day long mutually retweeting and voting up the same posts of their so-called “friends” and “followers” on site after site after site. Well, I don’t believe that anyone can actually establish real relationships with hundreds or thousands of bloggers. I do believe that some folks are so deluded that that’s what they are focused on ie. gaining more and more pseudo friends and followers, and entering what amounts to mutual spamming and reciprocal voting up arrangements buttressed by “small talk” that they choose to refer to as “relationships”.
Keywords are found in the natural flow of all languages and all conversation that occur either off-line or online no matter which language it is. I apply basic SEO to my posts and the structure of my blog so the odds that my posts are found by those using search engines are increased.
That being said, I question the relevance and the excessive number tags used on this post. That kind of spamdexing is usually seen on blogs of folks who have been sucked the game the search engine SEO tactics, so finding them on this post is supremely ironic.
Hi Timethief, thanks for the visit and sharing your thoughts. I take your comment and advice about the use of the tags to heart. I’m certainly not trying to play any SEO games that would cause alarm. Point well taken.
Thanks for taking my advice and removing the superfluous tags Ileane. Everywhere these days we are faced with decreasing relevance in search results not only due to spamdexing, but also due to bloggers who create duplicate content blogs. Search engines aim to provide the most relevant search results but we are swimming in a sea of pollution that is diluting relevance in the SERPS (search engine result pages). That’s why I’m glad that wordpress.com has dealt with spamdexers effectively (re: global tags page limits) and why I’m also glad Google is on the case as well.
Keep on blogging. 🙂
OOPS! I just notice this post has a do-follow blog list tag. Why is that? What relevance does that tag have to the contents in this post, and on this no-follow blog?
I missed that one too. I must admit, I haven’t heard the term “spamdexing” used much. I’ll look into it more.
Thanks.
Spamdexing is a very broad term used for describing a very wide range of approaches that all amount to attempts to game search engine results. One of those ways is assigning irrelevant tags to posts. Others include even more nefarious black hat SEO practices such as hidden links and keywords.
All forms of spamdexing are aimed at gaining a better position in search engine rankings to secure more “traffic” and spamdexing is more common in the make money do-follow community of bloggers than it is in the non-monetized blogging community. That’s simply because make money bloggers are really after “ad-clickers” as opposed to readers. In some cases the only “readers” some want are simply those who will tacitly agree to help spam links to every post they publish throughout social media sites and social networks.
I’m a librarian and the spamdexers I noticed in the past fell into two broad groups. One group was comprised of beginners, who were assigning the same HUGE block of irrelevant tags to each and every post they published (85 – 350 tags!) out of ignorance or opportunism. The second were comprised of penny ante black hatters inclined towards using sex scandal tape tags to promote posts on completely unrelated topics. I also noticed that we had some members who were editing and editing and editing posts to change the timestamps and keep their posts at the top of the wordpress.com global tag pages as well.
In response to the situation WordPress.com Staff made two changes simultaneously. The first change was that the original time/date stamp at publication is the one posts are filed in order of on the global tag pages, regardless of how many times that post is edited. The second change is that any more than a combined total of 10 categories and tags on any given post means it will not appear on the wordpress.com global tag pages. Scroll down to 4. at this link http://en.support.wordpress.com/global-tags/
I hope this helps. 🙂
Very good topic. I think as long as blogging exists bloggers will argue about whether writing for readers or writing for engines..
Did you know that there is some certain golden middle? It’s when your readers are happy because of the heplful info as well as you are, because your posts rank very well by search engines.
This is what every blogger should discover considering its own unique writing style.
The good news is that the main principles are the same for everyone:
1. Use keywords in title, because this is the most important thing for Google (at least)
2. Create original content. Even if there are dozens of blogs, that have already written smth on this topic, don’t worry. Just combine those posts, upgrade with your own unique writing style, tweak it in the end considering SEO factors and publish your post.
3. Don’t stop. There are billions of people out there and millions of potential readers of your blog. Don’t doubt, that you’ll find them. Just take time. You can find them on other blogs leaving comments, or via search engines, making great SE optimized articles… two basic ways. Of course these are not the only ones.
Hi Allan,
Great points! Thanks for adding to the conversation.
I think writing for humans will also benefit SEO. It is basically the same thing.
For example your write something about “home mortgage loan” so most people will follow the link that says: “home mortgage loan”, they want to read something about home mortgage loan. So if you write the word “home mortgage loan” with bold does not mean that you write for search engines, you write for the normal user to see where is something written about home mortgage loan so he can skip some of the content if he don’t want to read.
Hi Lucian,
Thanks for your input. I appreciate the visit too.
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Wow I don’t check my mail for a day and look at all the comments coming in on my guest post, many, many thanks to everyone who is commenting on this subject 😉
I’ve arrive late for this party, but the comments here cover the topic fairly extensively.
At the end of the day however, I believe simply writing for your audience with helpful content that answers the questions that many have, while assigning the appropriate, relevant tags is what will get the job done (i.e., getting you found).
Hi Jimi, Even if you think you’re late, in my mind you are always right on time! Thanks for your input.
These are both important i rather to have all the readers this will help to generate more revenue seo is important for organic trafiic read thi post here http://www.lawmacs.com/post/2010/02/02/Write-For-Readers-And-Design-For-Bots.aspx
Hi Lawmacs,
Thanks for the link. I’ll check out your post now.
Hi,
I just now saw the comments you left on my blog about a week ago. Looking at your posts, I think you got the guest author running.
Thanks for stopping in on my site again, but I’ve stopped blogging on WordPress. It’s just because I made a couple of mistakes in the forums and nobody seems to like what I do.
I stop in on the forums and help out with CSS, but if you ever have any other problems feel free to send me an email at the address I used while posting this comment and I’ll reply ASAP.
Thanks!
wpadvanced.
Nice post! I think that a blogger’s readers is very important because a blogger need to discover and find out what their readers are interested in! I believe that quality and unique content is very important! It’s important to know their audience in order to draw their readers.
Actually, SEO was made for readers. But to be distinguished among the rest, we must implement our own uniqueness. By writing for people rather that search engines, we are making a distinction of our own. 🙂
SEO of course 🙂 Just kidding. But you have to balance the two. However, I think once you have some readers, the rest will take care of itself.
From what I gained from this article is the importance of networking with the readers. I have to agree with that, for as a blogger myself I treasure all feedback as well. When it comes to SEO, I would say don’t over-do it but still remain SEO friendly to some extent. While we are happy with existing readers, it certainly would be great to have new visitors occasionally from the search engine too. ^^ Depending on one’s goal on how big is that (search engine) portion.
Good job.
@wchingya
Social/Blogging Tracker
In the past I used to write for only my readers – which meant that once I stopped promoting traffic dropped substantially. That said, I focus more on SEO now, but try never to overdo it 🙂
Thanks the author for article. The main thing do not forget about users, and continue in the same spirit.
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very great information thanks. 🙂
love to bookmark it. 🙂
You do that!