{"id":6867,"date":"2014-04-29T01:00:05","date_gmt":"2014-04-29T05:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/allandouglas.dougbittinger.com\/blog\/?p=6867"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:39","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:39","slug":"seo-blogs-love-hate-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/seo-blogs-love-hate-use\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO for Blogs, Love It, Hate It, Use It."},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"seo,<\/a>I\u2019ve been writing professionally, at least part time, for a very long time: around 3 decades.\u00a0 More recently I started blogging.\u00a0 Needless to say, I\u2019ve been writing longer than I\u2019ve been blogging.\u00a0 In fact I\u2019ve been writing longer than blogs have existed.\u00a0 Therefore I learned to write according to the old school conventions, which placed making a written work entertaining to the reader above making it popular with a search engine.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Of course search engines have not always been as persnickety as they are now.\u00a0 Early on, search engines actually rewarded writers for using natural language and allowed them to include in the header of an article a whole string of keywords that related to the content of the article.\u00a0 A keyword string for this article would have included, search engine, search, seo, blog, blogging, article, post, web, internet, optimize, optimization, keywords, and writing.\u00a0 Search engines trusted writers to include a spectrum of words that were directly related to the article, even if not all of them appeared in the article.\u00a0 But then the spammers came in and discovered that they could insert totally unrelated, hot topic keywords to give their page a boost.\u00a0 If I were to include Miley Cyrus, twerking, and Justin Bieber, this page would become robot candy even though those words have nothing to do with what I\u2019m writing about.\u00a0 And so, the search engine strangulation began.<\/p>\n

SEO Evolution<\/h2>\n

Over the past decade there have been so many changes to the algorithms that Then<\/i> holds very little resemblance to Now<\/i>. \u00a0\u00a0I believe that the driving force behind this battle of wits between search engine programmers and web site or blog operators was greed.\u00a0 Once people found a way to cash in on page views the war began.<\/p>\n

When I began blogging, and studying the ways to attract traffic, I found many of the highly touted methods to be\u2026 let\u2019s say\u2026 less than honest, and I avoided them.\u00a0 Good thing too, because in short order the search engine programmers would find ways to block these methods and the SEO Experts would have to re-write their content or get banned.\u00a0 They\u2019d find a new loophole to exploit and the programmers would find a way to close it up.<\/p>\n

I also found reading \u201coptimized\u201d articles annoying.\u00a0 Being old school, I found text that was repetitive aggravating to read.\u00a0 Things have swung back the other way now and search engines are rewarding people for a more natural style of writing.\u00a0 But the sad fact is that the internet is so huge that your article becomes one grain of sand on a beach.\u00a0 If you want people to find your web site or blog, you have to use some SEO skills or be ignored by the majority of the universe.\u00a0 But you don\u2019t have to be a card carrying SEO specialist to get it right.<\/p>\n

An SEO Tool<\/h2>\n

I use a plug-in on my blogs to help me measure the SEO effectiveness.\u00a0 I\u2019m not hawking the plug-in and I have no connection to its creator, it\u2019s just a tool I use.\u00a0 There are similar versions, but this is the one I like.<\/p>\n

Upon saving the article as a draft, the plug-in rates the article with a battery of tests and gives me a report.\u00a0 For a real simple, How\u2019m I Doin there is a \u201ctraffic light\u201d signal off in the right margin of the text editor that shows red, orange, yellow or green.\u00a0 Red being \u201cnot even close\u201d and green being, \u201cgood to go\u201d.\u00a0 There is also a gray light if it thinks you haven\u2019t even tried.<\/p>\n

\"SEO<\/a><\/p>\n

Below the text entry screen is an SEO data screen.\u00a0 Some of this data can be automated through your set-up choices, some need to be entered manually.\u00a0 I select my keyword or keyword phrase and enter an article description, automate the rest.\u00a0 Once I\u2019ve entered the keyword it will give me stats on usage of that keyword.\u00a0 Change the chosen keyword and the stats change.<\/p>\n

\"SEO<\/a><\/p>\n

On another screen I get a deeper examination of the way I use the keyword with suggestions on what I could do to improve my score.\u00a0 I look at these, but often ignore or down-play some of them.\u00a0 For instance the article from which I took this screen shot was a technical piece on a canine health issue.\u00a0 It used some medical jargon and some complicated sentences, so it scored really low on the readability score. \u00a0That\u2019s just fine with me.\u00a0 To score a Very Easy on this score the article needs to read like a Dick & Jane book.\u00a0 That\u2019s not how I write.\u00a0 On my prattles I shoot for a Pretty Good score.\u00a0 On technical pieces I ignore this altogether: anyone intelligent enough to be studying up on these issues is intelligent enough to read an article aimed at grown-ups.<\/p>\n

There is a growing trend, especially in the content creation markets, of going to very short articles with simplistic language.\u00a0 300-400 words, all sentences short and clipped.\u00a0 This is driven by readers who don\u2019t read.\u00a0 They skim.\u00a0 Some web sites buy these articles to draw people for the page views, they don\u2019t care if people actually learn anything.\u00a0 Those people do not like me.\u00a0 I\u2019m ok with that.<\/p>\n

The other scores are pretty self-explanatory.\u00a0 If you have any questions, drop a comment below (no charge, I won\u2019t even add you to a list and my site will shoot you an e-mail with my response) and I\u2019ll provide more detail.\u00a0 Otherwise, I hope this has helped you.\u00a0 Thanks for reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been writing professionally, at least part time, for a very long time: around 3 decades.  More recently I started blogging.  Needless to say, I’ve been writing longer than I’ve been blogging.  In fact I’ve been writing longer than blogs have existed.  Therefore I learned to write according to the old school conventions, which placed … Continue reading “SEO for Blogs, Love It, Hate It, Use It.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[40,16],"class_list":["post-6867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-educational","tag-blogging","tag-promotion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6867"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19546,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6867\/revisions\/19546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}