Blogging Your Brand With SEO – Why Wouldn’t You (The Seth Godin / Solomon Rothman Debate)?
Last Thursday I wrote about blogging for your brand and the importance of the content as a reflection of who you are. The following article is a great example of an online debate (click the link at the end to go to the sources and see the comment dialog with Seth. This is a great discussion about the importance of SEO in response to a post from Seth dissing it. This dialog between Solomon Rothman and Seth Godin never resorts to personal attacks. Solomon passionately but professionally pursues a conversation with Seth about the importance of SEO.
Regarding the actual debate, I am also weighing in … I think Seth is dead on in his assertion that short cuts from snake oil type SEO folks are not good. I also agree and have mentioned this many times in this blog; delivering a product that offers a clear benefit (return on investment) is THE most important marketing achievement. Marketing can overcome a bad product but only for a while. The only way to build loyal long term customers is a great meaningful product.
Now I also agree with Solomon, SEO is an important marketing tactic and any business owner worth his stock is investing in a top notch SEO firm to help him drive high quality traffic using these tactics. This is not a short cut, it is just marketing. Why would one ignore a tactic that can increase traffic and drive brand awareness?
In the comment dialog between Soloman and Seth, Seth mentioned that he doesn’t want an increase in traffic (in response to an offer for a free SEO service), his blog is just a blog and he just uses it for writing. That may be the case for Seth, but for the rest of us, our blogs are our best strategy to impact the market, change opinion, drive new leads, and establish the brand and the blogger as in industry influencer. Seth may have already achieved this and is comfortable not pursuing new readers, but the rest of us can’t be that causal.
My vote is, develop a product that is creative and spectacular that changes peoples lives, then market the hell out of it using all your marketing tools ESPECIALLY SEO!
Famous
Marketer Seth Godin Gives Bad SEO advice
last modified March 29, 2007, by Solomon Rothman
If you don’t know who Seth Godin is, you probably don’t read a lot of marketing blogs or marketing books. He’s authored about a half dozen, including my personal favorite entitled “All Marketers Are Liars.” He’s spoken at Google and his blog was recently listed as the number 1 marketing blog in the world. Ok, enough with his bio; one of his recent posts greatly disappointed me, because he apparently doesn’t understand SEO. After looking deeply at his blog, I was horrified to discover some major downfalls. So I’m going to make some claims, show some evidence and put forth a logical case against his view point and I’m even going to slam his article on SEO as naïve, ill-contrived and most importantly, encouraging of a very expensive mistake for business owners. I’ve got nothing personally against him, but when someone that public publishes something so ignorant concerning a large part of my profession, it warrants a strong response.
First let’s go over his position. His post entitled “Shortcuts That Aren’t So Short” compares SEO to taking short cuts and basically makes the case you see in the following quote:
“Others spend time studying the algorithms of Google and Yahoo to figure out the very best way to jump ahead in the rankings for their blog or corporate site. Is it reciprocal links or careful metatags?… Hey. It’s not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what’s good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that’s worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it’s easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.”
Unfortunately, his position is misleading and can be potentially deadly for your business. I don’t need to use a theoretical example this time. This problem is so widespread that I’m going to give a REAL life example I worked on THIS week. That’s right THIS WEEK! It contradicts all the major purists’ statements against SEO, including Seth Godin’s. One of my weekly projects is for a financial advisor that just launched a new website and blog a month ago. The author is a former newspaper journalist; and he’s off to a prolific blogging start (he posts daily) and his articles are EXCELLENT. His current traffic level is next to 0.
The problem is his blog is designed incorrectly. It uses the same title on all the pages and none of his posts target specific keywords. Additionally, the blog doesn’t ping anywhere when new posts are added, so none of his posts are showing up on any of the blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search. There are other issues as well, but that’s a simple beginning of what I’ll be working on with his site.
Basically his blog is invisible and nothing except fixing the design problems and targeting keywords is going to change that. He could continue to write all the GREAT posts he wants, but no one will be reading them. Why? Google has only indexed his front page and is never going to rank any of his posts for anything. He has great content, but no one’s reading it. What does he need? SEO. While I don’t like using that term, it is appropriate in this instance: he needs an SEO expert to rework his blogging strategy so his posts and blog rank on Google and drive new readers and new potential customers to his site. In the next month I’ll post detailed stats so my readers can see the gigantic traffic increases that are going to result DIRECTLY from my work with his site.
Not every example has to involve new sites or even significant design changes to make profitable gains in the search engine results pages. I recently changed 5 lines in the .htaccess and robots.txt for a particular website. That’s right, just 5 lines of code. It resulted in traffic increases of 20% with the raw traffic being 200 more DAILY visitors from Google. That’s a lot of traffic from changing 5 lines. So what happened? I told Google not to index the duplicate content portions of a particular website; among other things, this resulted in more page rank flowing to the internal pages as opposed to being wasted on duplicate content sections. Yeah, all that from 5 lines!!! Here is a link to a post by Shoe Money, a famous Internet Marketer and one of the top 100 bloggers according Technorati; recanting a similar story of changing only a few lines and seeing a big difference.
Now I’ll illustrate how SEO can help another HUGE A-list bogger like Seth Godin who already has an audience. Jason Calcanis, a very popular blogger, recently blasted SEO as bullshit and was met with a challenge by Neil Patel that said he could increase the traffic to Jason’s blog by over 20% by implementing some basic changes within only a few months. Jason, who already had a popular site, readers and a large audience, took the bet. Within two months his traffic was already up 20% and most of the changes recommended by Neil haven’t even been executed yet. You can read about that more at the link above. The unfortunate thing about this story is that Jason ended up getting SEO for free.
So now I’ll give my challenge (although I doubt he’ll respond) to Seth Godin: pay for my SEO services and I’ll increase your traffic by 20% or more (probably more like 40%) in 6 months. If I fail to have gains that substantial, I’ll give Seth all his money back. With all the increased traffic and subscribers I imagine even Seth Godin would sell more books and all that by implementing SEO and design changes.
Imagine if someone who isn’t already famous, who has to fight to get people to see their blog posts and is just building their online presence, takes Seth’s advice? They’ll be shooting themselves in the foot. Sure there are no magic shortcuts; you can’t just get a bunch of spammy links, but paying attention to keywords and using a design that encourages optimal search engine optimization has MAJOR positive effects when the other stuff is right too. It’s not a little thing, it’s huge and it can be the difference between your business website failing or being successful online.
Google is not as “smart” as people seem to think it is. It’s more like a 5 year old. You have to tell it specially what keywords and what neighborhoods to associate your site with. It WON’T do this automatically. Lots of sites with great content don’t have the rankings they deserve, and it’s usually do to SEO, design and marketing issues as opposed to content quality.
It’s also worth noting that Seth Godin’s blog is on Typepad and absolutely terribly optimized for SEO. If he didn’t have such a large pre-built audience, his blog would be mainly invisible. A few little changes would increase his traffic a ton, even with all the links and exposure he already has.
Click Here to read the comments (in the highlighted right sidebar) from Seth Godin:
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