It’s not all write
Having long upheld the belief that quality content is essential for making one’s blog or web-site readable, informative and, most of all, fun, it is slowly dawning on me that quality content will never be enough on its own to obtain high page ranking.
Not in the sense of putting that knowledge in a place where people who could benefit could actually find it, anyway. One can have the best-advised thesis on a subject that’s ever been scribed, but, unless the platform for conveying these ground-breaking findings, i.e. your blog or website, has its mechanics oiled well enough to grease the palm, sorry, rails, to slide it into view, your theory will stay hidden forever.
Let’s pick on Google, for instance, as they’re by far the biggest.
I run a free, little Google site off my Gmail account, purely for our family, based upon the games the guys on Sky’s Gillette Soccer watch and commentate on (good to have you back, Mers!) every Saturday afternoon. We have a little league, I’ve devised a cup and we have manager of the month. The site, in essence, is an expansion of a spreadsheet (why, oh why can’t you copy & paste from Excel to Google docs?!?), with no conscious thought for SEO whatsoever; in fact, let me show you…
…it’s all here:- https://sites.google.com/site/darrellsuper6/
There’s an ‘announcement’ page, or site blog, which I use to summarise the results each week, then either Tweet my dad or G+ my stepson when the league’s updated and next week’s fixtures are loaded. But that latter notification, entering it into the Google-plus stream, is only a recent addition to the site activity.
Greasy Palms
With no SEO tactics whatsoever, you don’t expect to see your site in the page rankings; indeed, before I started ‘sharing’ the weekly blog in the G+ stream, it didn’t exist in the eyes of the mighty G.
However, since I have been using Google plus as a means to communicate our progress, submitting the site once a week, what do you know? Submit ‘darrellsuper6’ into a Google search now, and Hey, Presto! the blogs I have ‘shared’ in the G+ stream appear, as if by magic.
Now, there are two conclusions that I draw from this, and I think I know which I favour, but I would love to hear from SEO experts to contradict my preferred theory.
The first, unlikely theory is: with no intention to hoodwink the spiders, and the site containing purely content specific to its users (therefore very unique and targeted), plus it has fresh content once a week, the site is recognised, assessed on its merits, and thus is ranked.
Or, more probably, the mere fact that I have started submitting a Google site to their own social media platform, it’s a case of ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours’. Is it really that simple?
If so, I’ve ran an SEO assessment on my main site – what a game to fix it! I honestly thought, okay, I may have to insert a few header tags, which my basic understanding of HTML (thank you Notetab Light) can just about cope with. But when I saw the report – my Sweet Jesu! How many recommended aspects are there to SEO one’s site? And to top it off, it was written in a different language; or, rather, it may well have been.
I’ve started to make a stack on Delicious which the links in the subsequent report point to, in order for me to make my site more search-engine friendly, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to fixing every recommended aspect on it. No wonder people give up trying to make money on the internet (is it still 95% of start-ups pack up before they’ve made a dime?) – just getting one website ready for SEO is an elitist task, before even considering filling the pages with good content! The latter I can do, expertly; the former, we’ll see.
So, I’m off to consider my options – I’m still offering to (re-)write someone’s site content (within reason) if they give mine an SEO makeover: http://www.wwwriteright.co.uk, if anyone’s interested, and I can e-mail you the .pdf report as a starting point – it’s all so far over my head, it’s got snow on it!
I’m off to gibber in the corner – thanks for listening. x
zebedeerox 