Why Bloggers Need SEO

I’m going to bet that at least one person reading this post saw ‘SEO’ in it and thought “OMG, SEO! Not Again!”

Of course, that person might have ignored this post altogether and shot my chances of knocking some sense into him, but maybe you can help.

It’s a familiar story – SEO is given a bad name by over-zealous, uninformed and sometimes unethical marketers, some people consider this spamming, snake-oil peddling and in-your-face variety of online promotion to be the end all and be all of SEO.

There’s a twist in the story though: the things that ACTUALLY make up SEO – writing content that attracts links, networking in your niche, personal branding, smart site design – are lumped with the new fad of the day and not always considered part of SEO.

Take linkbaiting for example. Is it SEO? Let’s see now…quality content? Check. Attracts links? Check. Promoted through network of friends and to an audience looking for this type of resource? Double check.

Or let’s take good site design. Sitemaps, good navigation and internal linking? Check. Short, meaningful URLs? Check. Proper webmastering tactics such as 301 redirects and using .htaccess? Double check. The problem is in the definition and unfortunately this is where people tend to define SEO based on their own agenda. If you’re pushing blogging, SEO is snake-oil salesmen pushing 1000s of free directory links.

Here’s the thing – SEO is SEO by any other name. You may call it ‘new media’, or blog marketing, or site optimization, or plain ol’ marketing.

It’s the same damn thing.

Bloggers need SEO because it offers a single system for managing your blog’s marketing. It’s a set of guidelines and tools that will push to be a better marketer, a better writer and a better webmaster.

But most of all, Bloggers need SEO because SEO is exactly what they are doing most of the time on their blog.

Let’s test that claim. Do you make an effort to write quality, link-worthy content? Isn’t that SEO?

Do you network with fellow bloggers in your niche? Isn’t networking part of SEO?

Do you launch your blog with a bunch of trusted links from top blogs, friends and a few good directories? Isn’t that SEO?

Come to think of it, isn’t a good blogger also a good search engine marketer?

The above rant was ‘inspired’ by this Performancing article.