Sunday 25 May 2014

What's this SEO Business All About?



(Picture Credit - psuca)

I have been posting my writings on the Internet for about ten years. Of course, I like to get as many Views as possible. Reading around, this magic term SEO keeps cropping up…

A few years back I joined the writing website “Suite 101”. Each time I posted there I was given an “editor” who acted as my mentor. One of the things they stressed was “using good SEO” to attract views. They also had some “advice” pages explaining all about SEO.

SEO is “Search Engine Optimisation”: the thinking being that readers “find” things on Google etc. through using “Keywords” and specific questions, therefore the writer needs to use such keywords etc. in their titles.

Quite simply, if you use “Beckham” in your title and text then you will attract David Beckham fans. Simples.

However, the more advanced SEO advice gets rather involved. They talk of the right “percentages” of keywords to use in your text. Too many keywords is described as “stuffing”. Too few keywords will just not do.

They also talk of narrowing things down with some detail. That means having long convoluted titles like, “How to find David Beckham tee-shirts in the London area”. 

If I’ve got any of this wrong well that’s understandable: I just can’t get my head round it all.

Getting back to Suite 101: I got pathetic Views there and now they have closed down blaming “Google Panda” for it. (Google Panda is where Google took steps a few years back to curb all this SEO business).

Whenever I deliberately try to use keywords I fall flat on my face. My latest blog here “Facebook for Me” has had few views. Yet I thought Facebook supposed to be popular!

I once stuffed a blog with lots of “desirable” words and again turned up with next to nothing.

By far my most successful blog, posted on Triond, was, “Beat the Bullies with Assertiveness Plus.” That blog has had nearly 27,000 Views since November 2012, and over 1800 Views this very month. Somehow bullying and assertiveness hits a chord with American readers.

Recently my blog “Freedom, Not Correctness, in Poetry” has scored a respectable 525 Views. And I thought people found poetry boring! Ironically my actual poems attract very few views on Triond.

My best poem for Views has been “Mirror, Mirror” on my Google “Blogger” Blog (7,148 Views). Again I cannot explain this. Maybe it’s something to do with “Snow White” films or with the image of a mirror I used. It went viral for a few months then stopped. I posted a further poem “Mirror” which bombed.

As I type, “Bullies” has had 45 Views already today and I still don’t know why! No comments for ages mind you, just constant Views.

The answer to all this? I really do not know.


Paul Butters

PS (27\5) let's see if This link works -  http://writinghood.com/online-writing/writing-my-way/

Yay! A Triond link worked today at last ^^^^^^^^^^^^!!!

Okay so let's try a link that will NOT work on earlier posts here -

http://authspot.com/poetry/fear-175/

Yay Again! ^^^^ This one works too, if after 2 attempts or more. So THIS post works better than previous ones - no "403 Forbidden".

Oh and last week I made sure that my blog posts have blue or other backgrounds instead of stark white.

No comments:

Post a Comment