When I wrote I don’t want to turn work off, I discussed how your blog is one of the ways you can build a bigger megaphone to spread your message. Good search engine optimization (SEO) is just another one of the ways to expand your audience. It’s quite likely that those who find your blog through a search engine would never have found you another way.
Blogs are meant to be read
Unless your blog is a journal, you should write each post with the intent to have as many people as possible read that post. The more great posts you write, the more word will spread that you have a blog worth reading. The amount of traffic your blog has is one of the factors Google considers when assigning authority to your blog. A blog with greater authority will normally rank higher in search results, or at least that’s the way it seems to me. So if good SEO practices get more people to your blog and that increases your authority further yet, it just makes sense to learn about it right?
Well thought out SEO works while you sleep
People are searching the web 24/7/365, and that means that if you take the time to get your SEO right, it’s working all the time to bring more traffic to your site. That doesn’t mean you should write your posts strictly with SEO in mind. I write for humans in my voice first, then let Scribe (Shelby discussed this in yesterday’s post) suggest minor tweaks that will improve SEO and make the content here more appealing to the Google search algorithm.
SEO is a school of continuing education
Be warned that once you go down the SEO path, you will either love it or hate it. Now that I am finally beginning to really understand search after a year of studying it, I love it. In fact, writing this post encouraged me to investigate SEO for WordPress categories. Scribe SEO doesn’t directly help in this area, but what I learned from Scribe allowed me to properly fill in the SEO-related fields for both the She Said, He Said and Double your htc EVO battery life categories.
Writing a post represents about half the time I invest in that post. The balance is spent preparing the post for publication. This includes finding an image, editing and, yes, SEO analysis, which includes picking a category and tags for the post. There is more to blogging than just writing and SEO is a big part of what’s left when you are all done with the writing.
Tonight’s #shehechat topics:
By the way, we are going to be Ustreaming live from AJBombers in downtown Milwaukee again tonight. If you can’t join us in person, you can watch us here live.
We also have a special guest tonight. The wonderful Robin Schooling will be joining us this week. Robin left Milwaukee to take on the role of vice president of human resources for the Louisiana Lottery Corp. She’s going to be in Milwaukee and we thought it’d be fun to meet her for burgers, beers and a little #shehechat. In honor of Robin joining us, the first of tonight’s topics is dedicated to her.
Tonight’s #shehechat topics
1. Should HR control its employees’ social media voices?
2. How to handle SEO on your blog.
3. Is it okay to use bad grammar in social media?
Updates on #shehechat
- “She Said, He Said” has its own page on this site now. You can check it out here.
- We took “She Said, He Said” live onstage for the first time at WordCamp Chicago on July 30. We had a blast and we hope to be sharing our presentation video soon. Stay tuned!
- Read some of our past “She Said, He Said” blog posts here.