I have already described my opinion about constantly updated content and its impact for the search engines. Lets move a step forward. I mean, Google moves even forward with this idea. Take a look at the simple picture below, which you have already seen probably thousands of times:

Everything’s all right? Sure, I didn’t make any changes with Photoshop except cropping it. There are categories for sorting of blogs’ stories in it, offered by Google. When you search for the blog post you see it on the left side of the window. Google created a habit which didn’t rise any doubts in our brains. What is more important personally for me: a really fresh content (the best if written 10 seconds ago)  or a content that is created by smart and clever people, who have an outstanding knowledge of the thing, exceptional analytical capabilities, proximate sources of verfication about what they are saying and so on? I would choose the latter arguments.

What is a fresh content by default? It is an accidental, poetical, unjustified, meaningless, ephemeral kind of information. Does it have any sense?

But, as you see in the picture, Google pays much attention to it. The worst thing if you post something “anytime”. The less worse is if you updated your website once in a month. A little bit better if you write every week. It’s completely normal to create a post each day. It quite a good result to make something fresh every 12 hours. And the best what you can do, is sitting by your PC all day and updating website hour by hour. Or to say in simple words: the heavenly thing is to write as often as you can.

For me it is not important at all if the post was written an hour ago or a week ago. It has to be inspirational, revealing and inproving my intelligence. Everthing else does not matter.

Google goes in reverse way. People have to write anything and as often as they can. There is no place for other categories in Google’s quick or advanced search of blogs.

Matt Cuts says that “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” in the 12th slide of this presentation.

I want to argue a little bit: 100 % of websites, that I read and check usualy are based on WordPress platform. So, the question remains the same: what are the real rules to make site visible in the internet?

WordPress – as you know well – is a CMS created mostly for constantly updated content. Frequency, variety, diversity of tags and content are the anchors of the success of SEO.

The motto of Google’s conception could be “Lets make people working horses”. Join the space of the most frequently updated content and you’ll be the winner. Lets work if you think that it is possible to say something everyday and to stay interesting. I do not think so.

]]> http://www.cometos.com/seo-blog/wordpress-a-success-of-seo/feed/ 0 http://www.cometos.com/seo-blog/the-true-value-of-a-blog/ http://www.cometos.com/seo-blog/the-true-value-of-a-blog/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:57:52 +0000 Paulius Sluškonis http://www.cometos.com/seo-blog/?p=625

The first thing you do when you are in social marketing business – you seek to be updated with a fresh information each day. So, you read a lot of blogs related with your working field. The blogs which are written by the stars and professionals  in IT, PR, SEO and social marketing industry.

So, first of all I want to present my conclusion of what I get in these popular and  the most popular blogs: and what I think about them: complete fake (noise) of information and waste of time. It is time to prove it. Lets talk a little bit about latest posts of well known blogs.

1. To be fair and honest 100 % I can tell, that my Cometos blog is completely worthless till the post of 20th of September, 2009. It was made just to keep it alive, embeding kind of funny stuff and “hot” IT facts, recalling more illusion of a importance than a really significant event.  But one day I somehow got up from  this strange dream and have tried to look at things differently. The thing I discovered was: THERE ARE NO REALLY IMPORTANT NEWS IN BLOGS.

2. Lets start. I wasted the first 15 minutes of my beautiful morning for Dan Zarella’s latest post called “Designing for Contagiousness”. The author counts 7 points how to make your site or blog viral. That was done 100 millions times in other 100 million blogs already. According to Dan the main things are: urgency, social proof, authority… Haven’t you heard already these things somewhere? The most interesting point is novelty, described as “People don’t spread content they’ve seen or heard a million times before.” Is Dan doing himself to prove this rule? Or he just didn’t get deeper in, writing it and freely passed it?

3. The next 15 minutes of wasted time: Jacob Morgan’s post “Social Media for Recruiting”. The same story again. I mean, many “important” boiling points about recruitment process using social media: you may know practically everything about the candidates: “their key areas of expertise, where they currently work, where they have worked previously, where they are located, what they are looking for in a new job, and that’s just the beginning”. Isn’t it clear and so simple by default? People open their personalities and they are narcissists on the social networks, so you may find anything about them without a trouble. Couldn’t that be said in one simple sentence without making a fake post dividing information in unnecessary and complicated structure?

4. Lets move farward. Brian Solis’s post “Group Mentality: Twitter to Debut Lists”. I can not understand at all these types of posts. There you can find only a short announce, that Twitter is working on PeopleBrowsr and a link to Twitter’s blog. There you may find no analysis, no subjective opinion, nothing.

5. Patrick O’Keefe wastes your time writing that he will not be possibly writing, because he goes to the IZEAFest. Read his incredible post called I’m at IZEAFest in Orlando, Florida!.

6. One more. Sure, we can talk about the time waster number one. It is, of course, Mashable. Many posts come every day in this website and maybe just 1 % of them are really useful and interesting. THE MORE CONTENT WE GOT, THE LESS IMPORTANT IT BECOMES. It is a fundamental conclusion about the internet content talking about web information, blogs or even news services.

7. So, I spend half a day trying to get some really important news. But my head was not informed by any serious events or facts. Even worse: I spend my time without a sense. And this happens day by day. Why to talk and to write something, when you do not have what to say? Isn’t it better to stay in silence?

What is blog? Here are different descriptions below. After watching this presentation – no doubt – you’ll start your own blog (if you haven’t one yet).

Paulius

USA Navy asked 16 bloggers  to spend a day on the USS Nimitz (the name of a navy ship). Commander Charlie Brown talks about the goals of this idea:

Jonas

We had the same situation in Lithuania from 1866 to 1904 as it is in Iran nowadays. So called “knygnešiai” secretly brought to people books and papers written in forbidden lithuanian language. Now iranian people use blogs to express their free will and free thoughts. They have a spiritual support here in Lithuania.

Paulius

IRAN: A Nation Of Bloggers from ayrakus on Vimeo.