Blog SEO Advice: Don’t Keep Shakespeare in the Basement

Don't keep Shakespeare in the basement.

Overall, BlogWorld was a pretty great experience for us. Although we weren’t able to do as much as we’d hoped, we did meet some wonderful people and learn some valuable information. We’ll probably be talking about and offering up videos of our experience there for the next week or two, so I thought I’d start out with what has become one of my favorite analogies ever.

This one was brought to us by SEO expert Michael Wolf (aka GrayWolf), and the imagery has yet to cease making me laugh. In a nutshell, he said that no matter how great your content is, you have to take advantage of and pay attention to SEO; letting your product or service just sit there is like keeping Shakespeare locked in a basement. (Considering the fact that I have no basement – just a creepy crawl space oozing with spiders and things that go bump in the night – this is particularly ominous. I don’t think he would have liked it down there. Poe, on the other hand…)

The session I saw him in was all about using SEO to get your blog a bigger audience and higher page hits. Although quite a bit of it was related to the tech side of things, and was therefore way beyond my comprehension, a lot of what he (and the other panelists Brian Clark and Lee Odden) said made sense. Here’s a brief and paraphrased overview:

• If nothing else, always put your keyword in the title.
• The best keyword use in the world won’t help unless you have interesting, relevant content.
• Keyword stuffing techniques are NEVER a good idea, because Google will figure them out.
• Links in remain the best way to raise your page listing (i.e., be interesting and interactive enough to get people to link to you).
• If you don’t understand how to put the right plugins into your WordPress or tweak the technical stuff to optimize SEO, hire someone who does.
• Controversy sparks interest; there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
• Create a 404 Not Found page that is unique to your site and has your branding.

Although much of this information reiterates what many of us already know, it’s good to hear it from a group of professionals who are pretty much the experts of the experts in the field. Blog writing is fun, but we also have to remember that a successful blog is one that pays attention to page hits, views, and links. You may not be Shakespeare, but you certainly don’t deserve to be kept in the basement, either.