I love Google! They provide incredible services to the online community for free! Plus, they’re giving away Gmail stickers now too!
However, I agree with Brian Clark at CopyBlogger in that we shouldn’t use so much energy to game the system. We need to concentrate on excellent content that is useful to many people. Writing a bunch of blog posts only to fill your site with keywords might get you some random search traffic, but it’s not even close to having loyal subscribers.
Simple comparison:
1. You get 1000 visitors in a month thanks to the 200 posts you wrote that were strategically written to include buzzwords from the long tail and the short head.
– Super~ These people will give you about 10 seconds of their time before they see what you’ve done. Real people can easily recognize a post that’s stuffed with keywords or that was purely written to attract the search engines. You got a visitor, but they’ll never be back.
2. You have 100 subscribers that read every one of your posts. They visit your site and occasionally leave comments. Maybe a few of them have blogs of their own and like to comment about your posts from there. Yes, that’s an inbound link that will help your search rank. You didn’t get it by spamming the Internet with garbage. You got it by writing content that someone found useful. They found it so useful that they took time out of their day to write about it and give you a link. Now the readers of that blog, who trust what the writer has to say, click over to your blog. Snap! More subscribers. And the cycle continues.
A little more math to back up #2: If you write 10 high-quality posts per month and all 100 subscribers visit, that’s 1000 visits right there. Add in the link juice and the fact that it will naturally contain good keywords, and you can expect a ton more traffic than #1.
Moral of the Story:
Everyone please stop writing posts solely for the search engines! Yes, I’m guilty too, but I’m starting to come around. When writing a post pretend that you’re writing a letter to a friend. If you wouldn’t send this to a friend, then why would anyone else care to read it? If you don’t pass that qualifier, don’t write the post.