the business of blogging

Randfish said on the SEOmozBlog that he and Darren Rowse had talked about blogging evolving away from sharing, and how that might leave an opening for twitter links to start trumping blog posts and appearing above them in the search engine results. The importance of rankings for any business makes this worthy of serious thought. He said:

…It seems very likely to me that the search engines will need to start relying on Twitter’s tweet graph, particularly for “new” information and content. Darren and I remarked that:

* Twitter, and sites that aggregate data from it, like Tweetmeme, actually expose content before social voting sites like Digg, Reddit or Hacker News
* It can be 12-24 hours between when content is first “tweeted” vs. when it earns its first external link
* Many pieces of “throwaway” content (a quick, funny image, post or video) will earn virtually no links, even if hundreds of people have shared them on Twitter

I think it’s way too early to determine if this trend is real, or if it will continue, but the SEO industry has been talking for years about when the engines might start to evolve beyond link analysis. This is one of the first credible expansions I’ve seen.

I am very happy to see this evolution unfold and ultimately think it’s good for both blogging and Twitter. Removing the “junk” and overly personal posts on many blogs improves their quality and relevance for a reader immensely. At the same time, confining those personal tidbits and shares to a micro 140 character outburst makes them a lot more palatable and desirable.

In a time starved world, the twitter/blog combo is a perfect division of labor. I can still convince myself that I am connecting with people even if all I get is a brief glimpse through their eyes at what is funny, important, fascinating, or revolting to them. I get that through the links they share on twitter. Of course, to truly connect we must engage each other in real conversations and use @replies, etc. that aren’t solely self-serving…

Even if all I do on twitter is absorb other people’s tweets and links, I can then explore, in depth and dimension, the blog posts that those links take me to. Mind you, I look at blogs as nothing more than a code platform that has replaced the static website. It is an accessible code base that allows bloggers to present their subject in whatever depth and form is best to convey their message. If twitter forces bloggers to concentrate and present more unique, high quality content, in the hopes of gaining links, more power to it.

That makes twitter the sizzle and blogs the steak. Having that sizzle come in the form of a 140 character message is a huge relief after enduring looooonnng sales letters, and squeeze pages of no information fluff in hopes of getting a bite of real meaty content.

Frankly, I even enjoy fewer links between blogs. I have attempted in this post to represent the original goal and purpose of links between blogs. All too often, however, they’re a cheaters way of “contributing to the conversation” that rarely amounts to more than “I heard” or “me too” posts written specifically to get a link from that bigger, more important blog. As a reader, I resent them and the wasted time I spent surfing through long posts to learn nothing new.

So here’s my bottom line contribution to the discussion Rand and Rowse had:
I’m no search engine algorithm expert, but Ido work every onpage and offpage angle I can to help my clients rank well and grow their business.

I wonder if, instead of taking over the rankings directly, twitter will play another, far more important role in the future of search. I can see a “tweet score” being added to Google’s algorithm instead of  tweets outranking posts. If tweets are replacing blog links it makes sense for a tweet score to replace the pagerank formula so many experts have already remarked no longer seems to hold much meaning. It makes even more sense when you consider that pagerank measured the importance of who linked to you.

Even if Twitter is cannabalizing links, I can’t see Google feeding it search prominance while waiting around to see if Yahoo or MSN is going to buy it. They’ll gobble it up first by incorporating it in their supersecret formula (and it won’t cost them a buyout penny). At least that’s what I would do if I were Google.

Posted under SEO

One of the hardest working plugins you will add to your blog is the All In One SEO plugin. It’s free, and easy to install and use.  But it won’t do you any good unless you use it. It’s not automatic.

This plugin allows you to set a separate title (what appears in the top bar of your browser), description and keywords for each post and page on your blog. That’s a tremendously powerful combination.

• The title bar as the first element of the page is very important to your search ranking. Use the keywords you want this post to rank for in the beginning of your page title. Some people repeat the blog name at the end of each title, but this hasn’t been proven to be vital to success.
• The description is for your human readers. In one to two brief sentances, you don’t want to tell your reader what the article is about. You want to tell they why it’s important, or why they should click through to read the rest of it. The description should be a teaser. If it’s not that sort of post or page, use several of the related keywords and tags that apply to the page.  Just don’t leave it to the spiders to pick out the first 160 characters they find on your page. That will most likely be giberish.
• The keywords are your chance to have this blog post, written eight months after your blog was launched as the fourth in a series of technical how-to articles, become the front door for search engine spiders, referral site linkers, researching prospects and potential clients with money in-hand alike. Deep linking can improve your overall rank in the search engines as well.

BUT…you have to actually use the opportunities this plug in gives you. Don’t let yourself be shortchanged because you only have time to add a link to someone else’s article as your blog post today. Plan on two to three minutes with each and every post to craft this information as carefully as you do your lead paragraph or headline.

It’s that important. Every time.

Posted under SEO