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“Ask yourself the secret of YOUR success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.”- Richard Bach
While I was sitting on a page rank of 0, until the recent Google updates, I started changing tack in my attitude towards PR, deciding that I wanted to be able to run this blog with less of the restrictions this was placing on me. . You may have noticed that I have been writing more posts with links to other sites; far more than are coming my way. The SEO gurus would probably shake their heads at this. I get a pagerank of 2 in the recent updates as compared to 4 with my old blog but I have already got more subscriptions than I had before. Posts where I have included links to resources or to other bloggers have been my most successful.
Provide a more complete resource
- Giving value and a complete picture often requires links to other sites. It is impossible to cover every aspect of a topic yourself.
- Why cover topics that others have already written about unless you want to particularly highlight them or add more information?
- There are experts in certain areas who know far more about a subject. Linking to them allows those interested to delve further.
Providing a more complete resource, even if this means a plethora of external links, should bring you return readers.
Practical Considerations
- If your current regular readers have not come your way via search engines why concentrate your efforts on pagerank.
- Because of time constraints, efforts should be concentrated on places which do bring you readers.
- If you blog in a niche area, why worry about ‘advertising’ to the whole world via search engines. Participating in social networking sites where you will find people interested in your subjects is much more fruitful.
- Social Networking sites have become hugely popular over the last few years. Search engine ranking alone is not as important as it was but old habits die hard.. Use social networking and bookmarking sites can lead to you having a higher position in search engines albeit in an indirect way.
Blogging Ethics
- Give credit where credit is due.
- Be honest and do not claim kudos for yourself for someone else’s efforts.
- Support and help promote your friends with links to their site and posts.
I am not saying that pagerank is not of any importance, but that putting too much emphasis on it can be counter productive; on your time as well as your results. Pagerank can look after itself if you are using methods of getting your site known that are more targetted at your own subjects and own blogging community of readers and friends.. Providing quality content is far more important in bringing you readers, developing blogging friends and contacts. Concentrate on providing what readers want not what Google wants.
You may have guessed that I am not such a fan of Google these days. The fact that I use the term search engine and Google interchangeably is a concern too. It always makes me wonder what I may be missing out on by relying so much on this one resource, their one method of doing things and a perhaps natural bias towards themselves. I am looking forward to the Firefox type alternative; which broke my reliance on IE.
This was intended to be an introduction to what is becoming a weekly reading list of links to other sites but it ended up being an insight into my thought processes as I pondered the ways which I do not wish to be a slave to the search engines.
As with my post on Carnivals I am intending to provide lists of resources which will include masses of links to other sites. Please give me ideas of what you are interested in the most. I have taken my blog description off here for a while, trying to come up with something less general and more representive. Maybe I should have a slogan that says “Blogging for readers, not Google”?
Thanks to Saboma of Maryannasville for leading me to find Richard Bach quotes in her post Jonathan Livingston Seagull and her StumbleUpon shout to this YouTube video:
Isn’t this so serene and peaceful?
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Sueblimely
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