As a web guru—just kidding guys! I hate that term too! Ahem. As an internet wizard, I’ve done some work with SEO. I’m obviously no expert otherwise I would rank number one for “Awesome narwhal artist” or something equally incredible. But I have done some work in SEO for eCommerce sites and blogs and I get the basics (and even a little bit of the advanced stuff). So between that and that fact that I have my own blog (which entitles me to write about whatever I want in a matter of fact way) I think I’m qualified to give y’all some advice: STOP OBSESSING!
Here's a handy guide to SEO I put together.
The “secret” to SEO is to not worry too hard about SEO. Yeah, keyword research and canonical links are all important, but in the end if you have a good site, people will share it on Twitter and Facebook. And if people share it, Google will notice.
Google is basically that quiet kid who sits around listening to what the cool kids are talking about to find out what’s cool. And Twitter and Facebook are the cool kids. So if people are using social networks to say stuff like “Hey this site is pretty awesome.” then Google will be all like “HEY GUYS CHECK OUT THIS SITE I FOUND. I’M SO COOL! I KNOW ABOUT ALL THE COOL STUFF SO BE MY FRIEND OKAY?”
Or something like that.
But there’s a bigger point I want to make. It’s not just about having good content and getting more traffic—it’s about getting the right traffic. Here’s a little insight into my personal struggle with this topic:
Recently I redesigned my website and rearranged a bunch of stuff. I wasn’t getting much traffic so I wasn’t worried about keeping old pages up or using a lot of redirects. Originally my website existed to help me show off design work and get some freelance gigs. Currently I have a full time job and I’m not interested in freelance work. But I’m still completely full of myself so I wanted to have a website showcasing my artwork anyway.
So I took down any work that wasn’t directly related to what I really want to show off… that means stuff like web banners, photo retouching and anything that wasn’t something I’m really passionate about. It felt liberating and I was glad to be rid of the clutter… until I looked at my stats.
Apparently I was getting search traffic for terms like “moire artist” because of some retouch work I did to fix a moire pattern in a photo. There were actually quite a few pieces from my old portfolio that came up in search that were no longer live on the site. Not a ton of traffic, but steady traffic. That got me thinking that I should put this stuff back on my site. “Oh my god, I’m missing out on traffic because I took down so much old work. Someone somewhere is looking for a retouch artist to fix a moire pattern RIGHT NOW and they’re not going to find me!”
And then I remembered that I don’t care.
Sooooo my point is this: don’t worry about every little search term you might possibly rank for—just focus on the stuff that really matters to you. This is important for bloggers and freelancers who are trying to brand themselves online.
If you’re a fashion writer, but you happen to get a lot of search traffic for a rant you wrote about the best burrito you ever had… those visitors are probably not very useful to you. They’re not going to stick around to read the rest of your blog or subscribe. And if for some reason you find that posts about burritos get way more traffic than any other type of posts, but you really don’t want to keep eating burritos for lunch just so you can blog about it, then don’t. In the end, it’s not the audience you’re after. (Plus, you’ll probably get really fat.) That’s not to say you shouldn’t be flexible if you find an unexpected audience, but you shouldn’t alienate the one you already have by making big changes to your content.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to work on ranking for “Awesome narwhal artist.”
