Weblog SEO - Is It Necessary?

Posted on December 12, 2005
Filed Under Promotion |

Nice discussion about Search Engine Optimization - SEO - and the weblog, in the post by Nick Wilson entitled Why Bloggers Don’t Need SEO

Wilson cites some highly credentialed SEO veterans all recommending that bloggers not worry too much about SEO for their weblogs, saying that basically the SEO techniques are wasted on a blog.

Responses from SEO-blogger Lyndoman add more dimension to the discussion. Lyndoman says, yes SEO is valuable, and his application of the technique to his own blogs has raised revenue - the final measure of success.

[It’s a wonderfully polite and agree-agree discussion, which is remarkable since it contains two directly opposite contentions. it’s a quick read, and it contains much substance.]

We think those SEO vets are certainly saying that weblog owners shouldn’t PAY for SEO services on their blog - SEO is expensive, and the marginal benefits don’t justify the cost. And a weblog is already a highly tuned piece of work in terms of search engine attractiveness and accessibility.

But Lyndoman is correct to say that they can be tuned even higher by SEO techniques, if the margin rewards the work. And Lyndoman’s point about mod_rewrite is the definitive statement about SEO:

But let me make this point, before I knew how to mod rewrite Wordpress I didn’t know how to do it, so even if it was common sense, it wasn’t common to me, once I learned it however it has become common sense. But I had to read instructions on how to optimise my blog for search engines by doing a mod rewrite, search engines bring people and people are good. But it’s perfectly reasonable for someone else to do a mod rewrite to make the urls more readable to their readers and so it is not SEO because it is not their intent.

We agree: SEO is the taking of pains that otherwise might not be taken, in the knowledge that the search engines speak a language ever so slightly more formal than we do in everyday life. SEO means not having to get lucky.

What Wilson is saying, and what everyone is agreeing, is that content is king again, and the weblog made it so, with its ease of publishing, and its utterly superb linking mechanisms. Linking now need not be studied for its esoteric nuances in the search engine rankings, if the blogger is more sensible to the physical function of the link, which is purely to connect two relevant points.

In practice on the Web today, a blogger who is savvy with linking, purely from the networking and content value of the link, will out-perform a blogger who is savvy about linking from the search engine view but less savvy about the networking and content-quality aspects of the linking.

Weblogs in their very design perform a large portion - perhaps eighty percent - of the heavy lifting that SEO has to handle in a static website, and they do it automatically for their bloggers. All that’s left is the networking, the publishing, and the feel for the pulse that - combined with the passage of time and the growth of archives - will bring the rise to fame.

We’re glad the blog is here. It’s a relief to us that the acronym “PR” can now cease and desist from meaning “Page Rank”, and revert back from its hijacked state to mean once again “Public Relations”, with all its classic moves of promotion - many of which, we notice, twinkle brightly throughout the blogosphere.

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