Whether you just started up a design resources blog or you’ve been writing on yours for years now, you’ve probably heard of SEO, also known as search engine optimization. Sadly, today many blogger focus so much on SEO that they forget about what’s important – creating content.
If you’ve been focusing a lot on your SEO efforts, and ignoring your blog content, I wanted to give you five main reasons you don’t need SEO.
#1 Visitors are Humans
When people think of SEO, they often think of ways to “game” the Google search engine. See, you’re already doing things wrong here. What you have to understand is that people come to your blog to find information. If they don’t find what they are looking for, they are going to run onto the next site that may have their information. Now, if your website is good enough, then guess what? They are going to tell your friends!
#2 Referrals are King
This brings me onto my next point. What you’re going to find is that if you build awesome content, people are going to get a kick out of it. Because of this, they are going to keep coming back and yes, they are going to tell their family and friends! Let’s think about a real world situation for a second here. You’ve been to an amazing restaurant before, right? Well, did you just go home and forget about it? Probably not! You probably went out and told some friends, left a wonderful review and craved to go back, right? If you’re shaking your head yes, then you have to apply that same theory to your blog! People want something so good; they want to keep coming back.
#3 Returning Visitors are GOLD
While referrals are awesome, returning visitors are fantastic too. Again, let’s take a real world example again. If you think about your major corporations in the United States such as Walmart, Target and so many others, they don’t rely on new people every day, do they? Sure, while they do try to snag some new customers every day, many of those that shop are returning customers, right? You don’t want a blog that receives one customer and that’s it. Instead, you need to lure them back somehow. With email lists and great content, this is a great way to keep your blog name fresh in people’s heads.
#4 GOOD Content Breeds Links
While I’m not discouraging you to stop building links, you have to understand what a good and bad link is. If you’re leaving awful blog comments, writing boring articles on article directories and spamming forums, this won’t get you to the top. Today, Google is smarter than ever and they want to see legitimate links. These legitimate links are going to look natural and they are going to come from authoritative websites. So instead, of focusing 99% of the time on links, try to build content that gets links to it. Keep in mind that people want to link to things that are unique. SO if you’re writing about “5 ways to save money,” people will probably not want to link to that. Be creative, create something that people want to learn about and keep at it!
#5 Go Viral
If you look at any of the top websites on the web, many of them have returning visitors and at one point in their life, they went viral. Whether it was the front page of Reddit, a Yahoo! news story or even a mention on TechCrunch, these websites did something to jump start their project.
So what I want you to do is take off your website glasses and really look at your website. Get honest opinions; ask yourself what makes you better than the rest. While you can start up another tech blog, WHAT is going to make you different? Stop writing about rehashed material and stop building lame links. This isn’t going to be good for the long run and won’t add anything to your SEO efforts.
In the end, create great content, let the word spread and remember, a great blog wasn’t built overnight.
About The Author
Deepu Balan
Hi there! I’m a web UI/UX architect. This is my online playground, my beautiful space to share my passions, my work and what I find inspiring.