I love blogs.  To be honest, though, I used to NOT care about blogs at all.  Yet when I started reading some really good blogs and then I started maintaining my own blog, I realized just how fun they can be.  But have you heard of some web site owners who have turned to blogging merely for SEO purposes?

The truth is that blogging has been touted to help one’s SEO program get started.  I have heard people saying that if you want to be a success in SEO, then your main web site should have a blog.  Now I am not denying it – blogs do play a role in SEO.

The basic premise behind a blog is that you provide fresh, relevant, and timely content on a regular basis.  Your ultimate goal is to help improve your search engine rankings.  What I have noticed, though, is that some blogs do not do this – they do not present well-written, relevant, and timely content.  Indeed, sometimes blogs made SOLELY for SEO purposes are not interesting.

What am I trying to say in this post?  It is really simple.  Jump into the blogging bandwagon NOT ONLY because you are thinking of your SEO strategy.  When you start blogging, think about your readers, how you can entice them to read, keep reading, and stick with your blog.

In the next post, let us look at some types of blogs that are examples of blogging solely for SEO purposes.

Photo courtesy of Daniel Greene

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If your answer is an adamant NO, then you might not be ready to take on SEO.  Well, at least according to Chris Bloggs, who wrote something about SEO being a lifelong engagement.  According to him, getting on the good side of Google is more than a one-time fix.

I have always thought the same thing and it is nice to read about experts saying the same things.  Even though this idea has been repeated time and again, it is still a good thing to be reminded of the effort and patience that is needed to get results from SEO practices.

All too often, we see and hear of new bloggers or new web site owners who want to make it big overnight.  They have this great concept for their web site and they think that it is so great that they should see results almost at once.  Of course, we know that this is all but impossible.  Even the best SEO practitioners will not guarantee such results within such a short period of time.

SEO is more than giving it your best shot once, twice, or even thrice.  SEO is all about having an overall plan and identifying specific goals.  SEO is all about having definitive steps as to how to reach these goals.  SEO is all about working regularly to achieve results over a period of time.

Indeed, SEO is all about the long, a lifelong engagement. Your thoughts?

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Comments are a blogger’s best friend – well, among many other things. We have been focusing on increasing Page Rank in the past several posts. However, as many of my friends online have pointed out, commenting can bring about more benefits than Page Rank. Google’s PR does have its value, but it would be good to not lose sight of the bigger picture because of it.

So what can we do with comments? Let us look at the situation from the other perspective – us bloggers commenting on other blogs. As I pointed out in the previous post, we love receiving comments but may be a bit lax when it comes to dishing out comments.

However, when we comment on other blogs, we take advantage of the chance of making new friends. This, in turn, can translate into attracting more traffic to our own blog or web site. Real traffic is something that also takes some time to build up. It depends on many factors, delivering quality content being one of them. Once you have this down pat, you still need to let the world know that your blog or web site exists. This is where commenting comes in.

I call this technique the “manual” way. That is, instead of depending on SEO professionals and techniques alone, you do your own advertising by visiting as many relevant blogs as you can and leaving quality comments as well. Remember, spamming is not the idea here. You are leaving comments because you want other people to become interested in your blog, to visit it, and to become returning visitors.

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I recently set up a new site for my own pleasure – just something I can play around with and use as a personal outlet when I need to vent. Just because it is mainly for my own pleasure does not mean that I don’t want to work on promoting it as well. That’s when I realized that I have to go back to the beginning and start building up the site’s PR from 0 to as high as I can get it to be.

As of now, I am not getting far – it has only been a week or so anyway. I think the hardest part is being patient. I am doing a lot of things but results do not come overnight. For now, I am focusing on getting the PR up. For starters, PR0 to PR2 would not be bad in several months. So how do I plan on going about this?

We all know that Google has not disclosed – and probably never will – how it calculates PR exactly. We do have a general sense of what they are doing, however, so we can try to work with this idea in mind.

The number of links that point to your site seems to be the major consideration when it comes to Google PR. So obviously, this is what you need to work on if you want to increase PR. So my site has PR0 right now – maybe a couple of external sites link back to it. How many do I need to get PR1 or PR2? I don’t have exact figures here (only Google knows) but Mark Walters suggests more than 50.

How do you get these many links? Let’s look at that in the next post.

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Some people do not do well when it comes to long-term planning.  I have to admit that I can be one of them.  There are times when I can barely plan my activities a month from now.  Then again, I do know the importance of planning for the long run and I do my best to do that.

When it comes to SEO, long-term thinking may be the best way to go.  Anyone who has had any experience with SEO and all its intricacies would know that sometimes, short cuts just don’t work.  Oh, they may get short-term results, that’s for sure.  But in the long run, what a web site owner wants is to build a lasting impression online.

Think about it, why are you maintaining that web site or blog?  Do you merely want to reap the benefits within a few months time?  Perhaps for some specific purposes, that would be enough.  But for many, the idea is to keep the blog or web site up and running for as long as it could.  More than that, you would want to keep that site popular and alive for years to come.

The only really clean way to do this would be to plan for the future.  This is where white hat SEO has the most advantage over black hat and gray hat SEO, I believe.  The latter two activities may bring about quicker results but in the long run, they may also be the downfall of the site.  Believe it or not, Google would probably catch up on these shady activities and bring the hammer down on the site.  What happens to the long-term growth then?

If I were you, I’d look into long-term results before deciding on any SEO practice.

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I’m not sure if I’ve made it known here at Smart SEO Blog, but I work as a professional blogger for some non-SEO blogs. When I say “professional blogger” in the context of this article, it means the following things:

I don’t own all of the blogs that I write for.
If I don’t own the blog, I’m paid to write for it.
Most of these blogs already have an existing audience.

Apart from my gigs as a professional blogger, I run some online businesses - with most of them having really competitive keywords. Let’s take the case of Business#1, my oldest-running online service. Here are the stats for the second most competitive keyword for that business (from Nichebot):

Competition: 58,900

KEI: 0.08

Predicted daily count: 123

A year ago, when the website was 3 years old, I got tired of searching amongst 20+ search engine result pages to find my site. Now, I’m on the first page for that keyword. I’m currently the 7th, to be exact. How did I get there?

As a professional blogger, I have access to blogs that have thousands of pageviews in a month. One of the blogs I write for clocks in around 45,000 monthly pageviews. Another one has at least 10,000 pageviews (a conservative estimate). All the main blogs I write for have a PR of at least 4 and above (not that it’s that important an indicator nowadays).

At this point I would like to reiterate that my website for Business#1 wasn’t within the first 20 SERPs for the competitive keyword I wanted. For three whole years, at least.
The only thing I did that made a difference in my rankings was to link to the Business#1 website. Using the said keyword as the anchor text.

And now the site is #7 within the first page of Google’s search results.

Pretty sweet. I can’t believe it took me 3 years to figure that out. (Then again, I wasn’t actively SEO-ing the site, apart from onpage stuff.)

Now the harder part is to get from #7 to #1. Here are some ideas on how I can get there:

• Get more backlinks using that keyword - not just limited to the blogs I write for.
• A small-budget ad campaign for increase visibility in the marketplace.

The rankings boost has already increased my number of clients for Business#1. I’d have to say that for an effective SEO campaign, that was pretty easy. It’s actually common sense, but it’s exactly the type of thing that you can overlook.

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Google Labs is experimenting with a voting system for their search result pages.

From the official page:
“This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.”

Basically, when you type in a search phrase, you’ll automatically have the option to “vote” for results that you like better. Clicking on the arrow button for a result means that you “like it”, thus moving the marked result at the top of the page (it is indicated with an orange asterisk as shown in the picture on the left). If you “don’t like” a result, you can click the X button and you won’t see that particular result when you use the same search phrase again.

This feature is currently in its experimental stage, so the Google gods only know how long it will be available and what aspects of this project will be permanently incorporated into the search engine.

If implemented, what does this mean for SEO?

Here are some things you should think about before you redo your entire SEO strategy for the sake of this new feature:

• It’s still experimental. This means that this feature could only be temporary, or that it isn’t in its final version yet. What Google finally ends up with might surprise you, so while you may speculate endlessly, plan for several possible scenarios and implement your new tactics only when the feature is made permanent.
• This is only available to users with Google accounts. Even then, not all people with Google accounts are logged in when they perform regular searches. Also, if these Gmail statistics are any indication of the numbers and demographics of Google account holders, you’ll see that they don’t have the biggest market share overall. Plus, their demographics compose of people aged 18-34 , tech-savvy, and have a relatively higher income than the average Yahoo or Hotmail user. If this isn’t your market, you needn’t be too concerned. Here are some other interesting statistics.
• There’s no social networking aspect. I’ve seen other blogs compare this feature to Digg, but that’s a bit misleading. It’s a similar voting system, yes, but it’s private. There isn’t any hint of social networking - yet. Only you can see your personalized results, and, as far as I can tell, there’s no way for you to broadcast your votes through your Google account.
• People might still figure out a way to exploit this for SEO purposes. I’m not sure how to do this yet, because the customized search results are private, but I’m sure some SEO genius out there will find some flaw in Google’s voting system.
• Creating well-maintained, unique sites with great content is still the way to go if you want more stable long term success. Happy end users and a strong readership is what makes websites successful in the long run. This is something that many website publishers and search engines agree with.

What are your thoughts on Google’s voting system? Have any of you tried it? Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

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