These last few days, I was involved in a discussion in a Facebook group that I found quite interesting and quite eye-opening about the point of view of digital strategists in this country.
One of the topics discussed was the application of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on a blog and this elementary topic spurred reactions that I can consider representative of most people’s perspective.
Do you think a blog needs SEO? The easy, fast and without further thinking answer is: Yes! But does a blog really need SEO?
The essence of a search engine is collecting and collating (indexing) the popular, and much sought after words on the list. The more popular a word, the more likely it will be on the top of the list. So if the word we’re looking for is the full name of a blog complete with the link then what we need to be on the top list of the search result is indeed, popularity.
In other words, a blog has to be pretty popular, searched by quite a lot of people to be able to be on the top list of search result. That’s how we play the game… fair and square. 😀
Then why do many people want to apply SEO to their blogs? I used to have an answer that’s reasonable enough for me. Thousands of blogs contain interesting articles, spread across the internet universe, so quality content cannot necessarily guarantee that the blog will be easy to find. Therefore in order to quickly stand out and be seen by search engines, they started applying SEO in the hope that the blog can capture more clicks and open up instant opportunity to quickly become popular.
The successful implementation of SEO and the ease of creating a blog not only open up opportunities for bloggers to produce better content but also inviting the opportunist to “trick” the search engine in order to raise the order of the list of certain blogs by using pay-per-click ads. So you can imagine the effect on the opportunist income by combining SEO and pay-per-click. Of course, they do not care about the result, it’s more important for search engine users to be tricked into clicking on one of their pay-per-click ads.
With the inaccuracies of search result due to the application of SEO on blogs containing pay-per-click ads, search result often filled with “junk”. So Google, as the world’s biggest search engine provider, launched a modified algorithm in February 2012 which it calls Google Panda to suppress the ranking of blogs or junk sites (low quality sites) and clean up the search results on its search engine. Ironically, the biggest player in the pay-per-click ad industry is Google with its AdSense.
Back to the headline above: does a blog need SEO? Surely now you can answer with more options.
Abang Edwin is a practitioner of online community management since 1998 long before the term social media/social networks become popular. He began his journey by experimenting with several online communities which eventually successful at that, to this day he still gives consultations about knowing character and foster online communities for brands / agencies and individuals.
He was at Yahoo! for over 4 years as a community manager. Currently he is Country Manager – Indonesia for Thoughtbuzz.net, a social media monitoring company.
[Image: Findyoursearch via Flickr – CC]
Of course! just imagine Facebook without Mark Zuckerberg. SEO can make your Blogging life made easy.