Yeah, stupid. I’ve found when you make a mistake the best thing to do is to own up to it, and then find something interesting you can learn from it. Aside from learning to check the stats on my blog more than once every three months, I’ve also learned that the robots.txt file actually works. Yeah, in fact it works really, really well. This graphic says it all:

That’s what happens when your robots.txt settings look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Not all that different than:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Wouldn’t you say? But it’s quite different. It’s the difference between having your site almost completely de-indexed or having your site indexing marvelously. So kids, learn from my mistake and don’t do this at home, at work, or anywhere else unless you actually want to avoid the search engines.

1. Set up a blog, just like this one.

2. Spend 100+ hours writing posts.

3. Spend another 20+ hours building links to your posts.

4. Give up and don’t bother to update your blog for a year or so.

5. Start posting again, and huzzah! You’ll start getting links from SearchCap.

Well, I wish I could enlighten you more on what did the trick, but I have no clue. The steps I’ve outlined are the exact steps I took. I won’t count out other factors involved like charm, good looks, and charisma, but if you’re looking for anything more I’m afraid I can’t help you.

Yesterday I was reading an article on CNN.com entitled Poll: GOP image goes from bad to worse. I then went to my politics blog and posted asking why are Republicans so unpopular these days? Within a few hours I noticed something happening that hadn’t ever happened before, which was that I was getting multiple comments on this blog post. That’s unusual for this blog, because it’s a new blog and nobody reads it other than one friend of mine. So I checked my stats and I had received about 60 visitors during the day to the page, and they were coming from the CNN page I had linked to.

Now it’s not there anymore, and I can’t link to another page as an example since that page will probably also change before you read this, but on many CNN stories there is a link at the bottom saying “From the Blogs”. If you expand the link, it will show you links to three blogs, along with snippets of what is on those blogs. You can then click through to the actual blog. These links are no-followed, but as I’ve found out, they can generate some traffic. About 100 unique visitors in my case. If you check the source of the page and search for “clearlydeparted” you’ll still find the link to my blog in the code.

However, time is of the essence. Apparently you have to post quickly after the original article is posted to have a shot at being one of the blogs that gets a link back. Which means you may want to sign up for the CNN feed so you can be Johnny-on-the-spot and post quickly.

Case in point, we just took over doing SEO for a billion-dollar enterprise with a substantial website, and what do you know, the last SEO people working on it stuffed the site full of stuffed image alt tags, stuffed keyword meta tags, stuffed url title tags, etc. And they were very thorough with their work in that they didn’t repeat the content of the various tags, they mixed it up in every case so they aren’t the same and therefore you can’t do a simple search and replace to find them all. The slow way to get things done would be to edit every page by hand, deleting the offending code, but thankfully Dreamweaver lets you do a wildcard search and replace that is a lifesaver.

Here’s how it works:

First, – [^"]* – Remember that code. You’ll learn to love it. Once again, that code is [^"]*.

Now let’s say you’ve got a stuffed image tag like this:

<img src=”whatever.gif” alt=”keyword 01, keyword 02, keyword 03, keyword 04, keyword 05, keyword 06″>

and then you have another one in a separate file that looks like this (notice the numbers on the keywords change):

<img src=”whatever.gif” alt=”keyword 01, keyword 03, keyword 06, keyword 08, keyword 05, keyword 06″>

and you want to replace both of them with this:

<img src=”whatever.gif” alt=”keyword 01″>

And let’s say it’s not just two tags, but two hundred, and they’re all mixed up, except that they all have the common attribute that keyword01 comes first in all cases. Do a search and replace, and search for this:

<img src=”whatever.gif” alt=”keyword 01[^"]*”>

and then replace it with:

<img src=”whatever.gif” alt=”keyword 01″>

IMPORTANT: Check the box that says “use regular expression”

In my case, I’m able to change anywhere from 10-200 alt tags at once, which is dramatically speeding up the process. However, I’m lucky in that when I do a search, there is more than one alt tag that contains the first keyword at the beginning, otherwise when I did the wildcard search it would still only hit one match. If that were the case, I would do a search and replace like this:

<img src=”whatever.gif” alt=”[^"]*”>

to:

<img src=”whatever.gif” alt=”">

This will empty out all the alt tags on the entire website. Granted, then I have to worry about filling them in again, but I was going to have to do that anyway, so I might as well speed up the process of deleting the junk that’s in them.

You could do the same thing to delete all the meta keyword tags on a site at once, even if the keywords in each tag on each page are different.

Now I agree there should be a better way to do this using some specialize SEO tool, but if it’s out there I don’t know about it. If you do, let me in on the secret.

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( “Location”, “http://www.new-url.com/” );
response.setHeader( “Connection”, “close” );
%>

However, my favorite method of doing 301 redirects is still the htaccess file.

Other 301 redirect methods:

301 redirects for PHP
301 redirects for ASP.NET
301 redirects for classic ASP

Here’s the basic code you’ll put in your .htaccess file, which either should already exist in the root directory of your website (“root directory” meaning the home directory of your website, where your homepage file is located) or which you’ll need to create:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^directory/youroldpage.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/directory/yournewpage.html$1 [R=301]

Of course you would replace “directory” with the directory structure of your own site, and “yoursite.com” with whatever your site is and “yournewpage.html” and such with your pages.

Once again, the SEO reason why you want to use a 301 redirect is because it tells the search engines that this is a permanent change in the location of the content, and so the search engines will de-index the old page, index the new page, and pass the value of the old page onto the new page.

Pretty straightforward. I just did it for a bed and breakfast client of ours.

You see, they had a page for their “Family Suite” room which they wanted changed to be the “Presidential Suite” because people were getting turned off by the whole “family” thing, since that’s not generally what people go to bed and breakfasts for, and so they were losing all the people who were saying “I want a big room but not a room that’s specifically for families.”

So now if you go to where their Family Suite page was it will now redirect you to the Presidential Suite page, and the 301 redirect lets Google know that this is a permanent change, which effectively transfers the beneficial information Google has about the old page to the new one.

<script runat=”server”>
Private Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader(“Location”, “http://www.mwi.com/”)
End Sub
</script>

I don’t pretend to understand every bit of the code, but what I do know is that I pasted it as you see it above into a .net page and it worked.

Use the Google Keyword Tool. Type in a few keywords relevant to whatever topic it is you’re going to blog about. See which keywords come up, sort them by average search volume, and then work those keywords into the title of your blog post. You want an example? Here you go.

I was about to write a post on my entrepreneurship / business blog about how I regret having used a bank loan five years ago to fund my business. Now if I were going to create a title without thinking of keywords I probably would have tried to think of something clever, like “Bad Debt? Or Debt Bad?” or “You Can Take Your Debt And Shove It” or something. I’m writing this post because I want people who are in the same situation I was, young entrepreneurs with boundless optimism, to think twice before they go and get a $100K loan. And of course I’d like as many people as possible to read it. But they can’t read it if they can’t find it, right? So what are people searching for?

With a little poking around I figured out that people don’t search for “bad debt” when they’re thinking of applying for an SBA loan. They’re usually searching for things like “small business loans” or “startup loans” or “SBA loans” or some other phrase with the word “loan” in it. So instead, I titled my post Small Business Loans for Startups vs. Bootstrapping. You see, the “vs.” makes it interesting, because it implies conflict. But the “small business loans” and “startup” and “bootstrapping” ensure that; 1) the blog post will come up in search engines for more searches by my target audience, and 2) that people will have a better idea of what the post is about. Everybody wins, right? Wrong!!! I’m just kidding, everybody really does win.

And do you think I used the same technique to create the title for this blog post? You betcha.

Such appears, to me at least, to be the objective of the blogs I examined in my other post. They seem not to have been intended for human beings to read, but rather for search engines alone. I say “they seem” only because I don’t want to create an argument about whether that is what these specific blogs were created for or not, although I hold it out that they were obviously created for search engines alone. I defy anyone to read this post on “The Surrogacy Process” and tell me the author of this blog posted that because they’re simply interested in that topic and had no other purpose in mind.

Anyway, the point of this post is not whether these specific blogs were created exclusively with SEO in mind, but that there certainly are SEO professionals who create blogs such as these for SEO purposes, and that while the content on these blogs may qualify as “good” in the sense that it gets the job done, there is good content, better content, and the best content for SEO, and setting up what I would call “fake blogs” is merely good, and that perhaps only for the time being.

2. Better SEO content. The principle difference between good content for SEO and better content for SEO is that better content focuses on both the search engines as well as human beings. Focusing on both provides the following benefits:

a. Traffic that doesn’t bounce. People stick around to read content that is interesting. “Who cares, I’m only developing this content for the search engines,” you might say, “I could care less whether human beings spend any time on my site.” Well, read Proof Google is Using Behavioral Data in Rankings and see if you care after that. Pay attention specifically to the part about the bounce rate and time spent on site affecting rankings of sites that use Google Analytics.

b. More incoming links. People are more likely to link to content that is interesting, and I don’t think I need to explain to anyone that incoming links are generally a good thing for SEO.

c. More traffic. This is a result of point a above. Let’s say you’re an SEO firm and you have a blog you run for SEO purposes, and in your blog posts you link keyword text to the websites of your clients. If you write the content for humans, then humans might actually read the content and might actually click on the links. But if humans are bouncing then yes, you still get some SEO benefit, but wouldn’t the actual traffic be worth something as well?

Simply put, if you want to write better content, think about human beings first, and search engines second.

3. The best SEO content. The best content for SEO doesn’t pay attention to search engines at all. No, Matt Cutts didn’t pay me to say this. To understand the claim I just made, you have to understand how search engines make money and what “ideal search” is.

The very business model of search is tied to delivering to searchers what they want. I remember the first time I visited Google, back in 1999. I looked at the blank white screen with nothing but a logo and a search field and thought “How is this better than Yahoo!?” These days I rarely touch Yahoo!. Why? Because I have experienced a higher success rate searching on Google than Yahoo!, and if Google and continue to provide better results than the competition then I will continue to prefer it.

However, Google is far from achieving what I would call “ideal search”. I’d say Google does what I want it to about 40-50% of the time, and perhaps I’m even being generous. Much of the time when I search on Google I never find what I want, even though it’s out there. The problem is that Google just isn’t “intelligent” enough…yet. Despite thousands of employees, armies of PhDs, massive server farms, and billions of dollars, Google can’t begin to compete, in certain ways at least, with the human mind. Case in point, the “fake blogs” I have referred to. I know at a glance that they’re fake. They’re not real blogs with real content, they’re just for SEO. Google doesn’t know this, and so it will index those blogs, rank the content, and those blogs can pass their SEO juice on to the websites they link to. But if Google could hook up to my brain and borrow some of my meager intellect it would screen out such blogs and rank them so low in the SERPs as to be invisible and negligible.

Although Google may never achieve ideal search, what is certain is that they will continue to move in that direction. Today they may not see the difference between fake content and real content, content that is relevant to humans vs. content that humans are not interested in. But next year, or in two years or five, or ten, Google might have become quite good at it, to the point where it becomes much more difficult to write content for SEO purposes. It may get to the point where Google is frustratingly good at discovering content that is created for any SEO purpose whatsoever, and may ding it and rank higher that content that obviously has no SEO intentions. In fact, this does already happen to a certain extent, but only in those cases where the SEO intent is so blatant that I hardly feel it worth mentioning. But this is why the best content doesn’t care about SEO at all.

Does it really matter? The school administrators at Caltech became concerned one day about the lack of social interaction between the sexes in the student body. Such a high level of ignorance regarding activities such as dating could lead to lower rates of reproduction amongst engineers, scientists, and other intellectuals, ultimately lowering the chances of children being raised by such types. Statistics showed that such types were more likely to come from families where the parents were such types, but if such types didn’t reproduce then this could spell disaster for Caltech a few decades down the road. It was thus decided to have a school dance to stimulate the student body and promote dating.

Things didn’t go well at the dance. The male engineers sat on one side of the dance hall and the female engineers sat on the other while the music played to an empty dance floor. The administrators huddled together in consternation and finally came up with an idea. They announced a game. They instructed the male engineers to line up on one side of the dance hall and the female engineers on the other and then face each other. “Ok,” one administrator said, “Each time I clap to the beat of the music, move towards each other one-half the distance between each other until you reach each other.”

Immediately, all the engineers on both sides sat back down. The dance was an abysmal failure, and todays lower enrollment rates at Caltech are the result. Recently one of the students who attended the dance and now lives by himself at a research station in Antarctica was interviewed and asked why all the students had sat down and now participated when asked to move half the distance towards each other. His answer was rather simple. “If we always moved half the distance towards each other, then we’d never reach each other since any distance can always be divided into two parts to infinity. It just didn’t make sense.”

And thus we see that when dealing with engineers, statisticians, and those in our society who tend towards the mathematical side of things that it is always important, when relevant, to use the words “for all intents and purposes.”

Another way to say it is to ask “Is good content good enough?” Maybe it is. Maybe better content is overkill if good content gets the job done and achieves the objective. My opinion is that it’s worth creating better content in order to gain the benefits thereof, but I could be wrong. The benefits might not be worth the time and effort, and after all, those who produce good content can switch to writing better content whenever they want to if it becomes necessary, and perhaps it wouldn’t take too much time to catch up with those who have been producing better content all along.

——————–

Disclaimer: My intent with this post isn’t to be a content snob. SEO is about results, and if two pieces of content get the same results then from an SEO perspective they’re the same. I might think one is written better and I might enjoy reading it more, but what does that have to do with SEO? I simply believe there are different levels of quality when it comes to content, and that higher quality content is and will be defined as such because it does produce better results.