After seeing tons of traffic and link juices being sent to a NYT article for apparently posting a controversial topic, I almost feel like SEO should be renamed as SCO (Sensation & Controversy Optimization). If your story is sensational or controversial, you are likely to get reaction, and especially if you are writing about passionate moms, who are guaranteed to blog about it, tweet it and provide link love from their hard earned page ranks (while cleaning, cooking, washing, diaper changing, picking kids from school, managing tantrums, and teaching hubbies about Facebook Wall). Google – Please take a note.
I bet it may already be a part of overall content strategy to deliberately put sensational or controversial topics 10% or 20% of the time. As a professional online marketer I delve into SEO on a daily basis. SEOmoz is a respected resource for SEO. I was lucky enough to speak with SEOmoz CEO, Rand Fishkin and share the discussion. I will be seeing Rand next week at Search Engine Strategies, NY conference, where I will be covering as press.
1) As you know mom bloggers are some of the most vocal communities out their on Internet. They are actively building communities on their blogs with twitter, facebook, youtube and other tools. Like SEO, Mom Blogging landscape is evolving. What can Mom Bloggers do beyond basic meta-tagging and keyword research to build SEO traffic?
Rand: There’s so much that could go into this answer, but rather than try to fill this up with hundreds of tactics, I’ll just name a few items and point to some relevant posts.
First off, building a community of engaged, interested, passionate readers & contributors is important for any blog on the web. Participating in existing communities with a large, regular group of participants is a good way to start, and being engaged on smaller blogs and sites that fit your niche is another excellent move. You’ll find that bloggers and web-savvy contributors are often happy to reciprocate and interested in your site once you’ve shown interest in theirs.
Second, consider getting your blog included in important places where it can attract readership. The generic web directories aren’t always a good place for this, but the blogrolls of other bloggers, top lists from traditional media publications and those places that pop up for searches like http://www.google.com/search?q=mommy+bloggers and http://www.google.com/search?q=mom+bloggers are definitely worth looking into.
For more tips, check out these two posts - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tips-to-earn-links-and-tweets-to-your-blog-post
2) Mom Bloggers spin out a wide variety of stories – parenting, marriage, friendship, campaigns & reviews, gender issues, support and encouragement. Overall their stories are funny, humorous, some times heart breaking, informative and revolutionary. Sometimes, there are great stories and community participation but little SEO traffic. For example, we created a post on stay-at-home-moms last year and people loved it. It still attracts comments, however not much SEO traffic. In your opinion, what is it that mom bloggers should do to deserve more SEO traffic for their well written stories?
Rand: If a story is well-written and compelling, it may just need a bit of tweaking to be made SEO-friendly. Remember that even the best post won’t attract much search traffic unless people know to look for that topic. That’s why keyword research is such a good idea. If you can learn what terms/phrases people are already searching for and optimize a story/post towards it, you’ll have a great opportunity to earn traffic for those keywords.
That said, I wouldn’t restrict yourself based on SEO and keyword demand. If you have a great story to tell that simply can’t fit in with any common queries, don’t worry about it – not all blogging is about getting search traffic.
3) Mom bloggers started blogging because they wanted to share their stories with other parents and learn from each other’s experience.What kind of content strategy should they have?
Rand: It sounds like their content strategy is spot on. They’re doing what they love and they already know the reasons why – to share, to engage, to get their experiences recorded. Businesses often need a strategic re-focusing to figure out why they engage in blogging or social media, but mom bloggers sound like they, for the most part, have that ingrained in their consciousness.
4) As we all know that links are critical to SEO rankings, how could mom bloggers get some juicy link love?
Rand: I talked about a few strategies at the beginning of the post, and those links should certainly be helpful. However, there are infinite numbers of
strategies for link attraction. Check out these posts (with literally hundreds of ideas) on the topic:
strategies for link attraction. Check out these posts (with literally hundreds of ideas) on the topic:
5) Would you recommend a group of bloggers to work together (as in SEOmoz or Huffington Post) on a single blog? or have them work on individual blogs?
Rand: If they can all work together with relative harmony and are pursuing the same goals and interests, combining efforts can make for a more powerful platform with greater reach than could be achieved individually. Just be prepared for all the trials and tribulations that come from sharing a blog/site – technical demands, marketing issues, time commitments, etc. It can sometimes be wise to have a single owner/leader of the platform making executive decisions and responsible for the upkeep, expenses, advertising, etc. and then a number of partners/contributors/employees. This is the model used by SEOmoz & Huffington Post (as well as many other successful group blogs like Techcrunch, Engadget, etc.)
6) How do you think real time search results from twitter or facebook are impacting SEO experience and marketing? How about FourSquare, Gowalla, or Whrrl? How do you keep up with ever changing SEO tactics?
Rand: Twitter and Facebook are both extensions of social media, which has existed on the web since the beginning (forums and blogs themselves are forms of this). They are powerful platforms to spread messages to lots of users, so long as you can appeal and be relevant to those people. As forFourSquare, Gowalla, etc. – for now, they’re more locally focused and I’d wait for them to achieve critical mass before I invested serious energy in them (unless you feel that they can give you an early-mover competitive advantage).
