I’ve been reading up on blogging, more importantly on SEO, that’s search engine optimization to us normal people, there’s a load of posts out there offering you tips on how to get your blog to rank higher in searches, thereby getting you much needed traffic. All this I assume in the hope that if you get enough people looking, perhaps you can make a bit of money from advertising. Sounds like a simple enough plan, doesn’t it? Well its not.
One of the recommended tips is the use of keywords throughout the blog (in the title, post, etc.), logic being it’s these keywords that the search engines latch onto, the more keywords = the more relevant your page is to the search = a higher ranking. That’s why when you google ‘milking an elephant’ for example, you’ll get results ranging from ‘man killed trying to milk elephant’ to ‘elephant in the fridge next to the milk’ jokes. Now to reach your target audience, you need to figure out what keywords are important and then use the same liberally. Its simple statistics really, figure out what the audience is looking for, and give it to them.
My problem is this, my target audience is basically anyone with passable reading ability, who loves music and swearing, and hates foolishness and being fucked with. Put that all together and the resultant keywords are read, music, foolish and fuck. Now put these into a 2000 word post, keeping in mind that these keywords have to account for at least 10% of the post for any meaningful ranking, and they need to feature in the title as well. Eh? According to this brilliant advice, instead of calling the post ‘Why Paco, Why?’, I should have called it ‘READ my FOOLISH tale of mind FUCK MUSIC!’. Doesn’t sound nearly as nice does it?
So I say damn the SEO theory, I’m better off with my audience of five, at least you keep coming back don’t you? You don’t? Ah well…
