Why Bloggers Don’t Need SEO

While I was at SES Chicago this last week, i had a chance to catch up with a few folks, naturally. For a few enjoyable, beer soaked hours, I sat at a smokey, dark little table in a corner of the hotel bar talking to a small group of the worlds finest SEO’s.

These are the guys that Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK all have on their IM’s, are invited to the ‘plex, and Y! campus regularly, get to beta test MSN’s Search features and despite playing on both sides of the SEO ballpark, both legit SEO and “spamming”, are held in high regard by the entire industry.

One of the topics of conversation was “Why Bloggers Dont Need SEO”.

What?

Funny topic of conversation huh? Particularly bearing in mind the participants area of expertise. It’s true though, and it’s something I’ve said here a couple of times in the past: For the most part, bloggers just shouldn’t be worrying about SEO.

That doesn’t mean that your pages shouldn’t be Search engine friendly, or that you shouldn’t use good anchor-text when linking out. It doesn’t mean that actively promoting your blog to other blogs in your topic area isn’t a good idea. What it does mean, is that bloggers shouldn’t be worrying about shitty directory listings, useless reciprocal link schemes or any of these “snake oil” ranking recipes.

If SEO’s think SEO on blogs is a waste, I think that says it all, don’t you?

It’s all About Humans

Blogging, and blogs are all about human referals – I mean, the kind of traffic sent to you from other blogs, as a recommendation, which all links are, though there is such a thing as a negative recommendation of course.

The most valuable link you will ever get is a positive recommendation from an authority blog in your niche – mostly. This means a link in the body of a post, not on a links page, or in a blogroll, but a genuine recommendation, or positive reference to your blog — preferably to a single post, not the homepage.

With that, you get:

• Traffic – real people, predisposed to liking your blog
• New Feed subscribers – Gold
• More links – Yep, links breed links, and so do Feed subs
• And guess what? You’ll also get Search rankings

Search Traffic Isn’t Entirely useless

I’m not saying that Search traffic is useless, though for many types of blogs it is. What Im getting at, is that by putting all of your efforts into getting links that send you referal traffic, rankings will follow naturally.

Once again though, i feel compelled to clarify that by referal traffic Im talking about links in the body text of authorative blogs in your topic area — blogrolls do work for this aswell, but to a much lesser degree.

As Andy has just pointed out, The Money’s in Your Archives, and for those archives to produce, they have to rank. So rather than arsing around with SEO, why not concentrate on what the pro-seo’s are concentrating on? Referal Traffic

Nothing Good Comes Easy

Well ok, sure it does, but not in general right? heh.. If you’re under the impression that joining some snake oil scheme, swapping links or stuffing your page titles’ with keywords is going to make you rich then you’re either an idiot, or woefully misinformed.

Bearing in mind your excellent choice of reading material today, I’ll assume your not an idiot, but that you most certainly do have a skewed idea of what makes pages rank in Search engines.

What you need to concentrate on is simple, but it does take a lot of work, and there is absolutely NO easy ride here. That’s just the way it is, anything else is spamming, and that’s a job best left to the professionals I think, don’t you?

So, here’s the rather obvious list of what you need to be spending your time on:

1. Content – Not just textual
2. Relationships and networking in your niche

Simple isn’t it?

If you write a great blog, and make an effort to network your niche and gain those all important regular deep links to your posts from other bloggers, you’ll rank, your archives will be monetized, particularly if you pay attention to such things as Time Sensitive Adsense, and your blog will be in Better Health.

Thanks to Dave, Todd, Greg and others who’s urls i sadly can’t remember for the bummed ciggies, the chance to watch Dave down about 8 pints of guiness in 3hrs and all the stuff I didn’t just blog heh…