I’ve fought political battles over SEO many times. Do meta keywords matter? How much do they matter? Should we use this or that strategy for getting higher rankings (common phrases or long tail phrases, a few keywords or many)? There are all sorts of philosophies out there. I felt a little famous when a friend pointed out my blog is everywhere in the search engines for affiliate marketing terms…because honestly I don’t monitor it at all. I don’t have time to worry or care. I just write. In fact, I don’t write in my blog enough.

I interviewed a few people at Affiliate Summit and we have some different camps when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). One group believes in formulas and exactness in getting ranked (a systematic approach). The other focus primarily on writing high quality, useful information for PEOPLE and arrange it so search engines can easily find and index it (site structure). Talk about formulas and their eyes glaze. (Can I name drop here? Rosalind Gardner, Colin McDougall, and Will Reynolds fall at various spectrums in this camp).

Personally I think there are some formulas or deliberate ways of going about writing that work. However, I’m not *that* detail-oriented (or I’d still be a web developer not a marketer). The actual implementation can take the joy out of writing for me. That’s what cheap labor is all about, right? let them handle the details (be the editors). In fact, I’d love to have a detail slave (there are people whose minds work like this I’m told) go through my blog and add links and format it and make it all look good for me. I need a blog editor, not as in a WYSIWYG editor or tool, but as in a real live person. I guess I know I’ve arrived as a writer if I get my own editor.

What SEO strategy more closely defines your philosophy? Are you a technician (you control the details to the desired outcome) or a creator more concerned about the overall affect (you set everything in motion and let the rankings continue to build)?

[tags] affiliate marketing, internet marketing, online marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, SEO blog [/tags]

One Response to “SEO Politics”

1. Mike Ebert Says:
   January 30th, 2007 at 12:01 am

   I tend to side with the “create great content and let it happen” camp. I believe that a systematic approach with tracking and testing is helpful, but there are two things that keep me from being an all-out technical person about SEO – first, we don’t know the exact numbers in the Google algorithm (and if we did, there’s a good chance they will change soon, erasing the testing work invested to discover the values), and second, the perfect search engine would tell us which content is best for humans. That’s the direction search engines are trying to go, so I may as well have everything ready for each step closer that search engines come to this ideal.

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