Over the weekend I glanced at my web logs and something caught my eye. The list of pages that people were reading seemed much longer than usual. Typically readers will focus on the past week’s posts, with a few evergreen ones, like the original Spend Nothing Game article. But this day the list was longer than normal.
Or so I thought.
I looked deeper and found that almost any day I could pick had a long list of posts pulled out of the archives. I just hadn’t been paying close attention to my own statistics. It was a pleasing confirmation of something I preach to my clients: good content, published as frequently as possible, is the best and most effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Many think that SEO is a strange sort of voodoo, a black magic of metatags and virgin sacrifices used to attract the search engine gods. But the search engines, even the great and terrible Google itself, don’t even look at metatags. They look at the content and the links that people create to your site.
After pondering this a bit, I did something that many others never do: I started clicking on the linked articles and reading them, reading them as if I were seeing them for the first time. I spent a pleasant half hour reading articles from throughout the year and I found that most, but not all, were interesting, well written, and enjoyable. Like other artists, in the past I’ve been reluctant to return to previous work, but this time, I really enjoyed reading and moving randomly though my site.
Reading your own work is an important part of being and improving as a writer, but it’s critical for bloggers and website owners. You have to occasionally test yourself and make sure that you’re doing what you set out to do.
Here’s my suggestion for you: spend a half hour sometime this week randomly reading from your site. Ask yourself if you’re meeting the standards you’d hoped to achieve. Read as if you were seeing your posts and articles for the first time. Do they interest you? Would they interest your targeted reader? And if they are, are you publishing frequently enough to keep them coming back? And note down the ideas that spark by revisiting your previous posts.
If you can’t stand to read your own website, who else will?
Note: see Patrick Rhone’s added thoughts on the topic here. I’ll have more to say on this topic in the coming weeks as well.
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Dear Randy,
I might go one step further and suggest that as you read you fix what you don’t like. The art and craft of revision is one that many blogs (and I don’t exempt my own) could benefit from. After all, we’re on the web, we needn’t allow the errors of the past to propagate into the future except within the google cache.
shalom,
Steven
An excellent point, Steven.
I heartily support fixing errors and omissions. But if it comes to a change of opinion, I think it’s worth maintaining the original and commenting back to it, detailing the reasons why the writer changed his or her mind. Google will out.
I couldn’t agree more! I’m no SEO guru but do know enough to realize that content is king. It doesn’t matter what tricks you have up your sleeve; if your content isn’t good you won’t succeed.
~Amy Sue
Thanks for the comment, Amy!
Another benefit is to create related links (where appropriate) with newer posts. If you are writing within a particular niche then you probably have covered the same or similar aspect of it more than once. Linking these related posts helps visitors flow through and is good for google’s spiders too.
That’s an excellent point – thanks!
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