Why Blog?
Saturday, March 24th, 2007So why is this content being presented as a blog?
Well, a set of analysis and reporting tools such as ours takes data (a webpage for example) analyzes it based on a set of rules and produces output. In designing the tools we faced some interesting and difficult choices in terms of what that output should be. The natural inclination as a user is to want a tool to output advice. “Your title tag should be 17 characters shorter” or “Your title tag should be ‘blah, blah, blah’.” The trouble with this is there is an awful lot of meaningful information that can be gathered from the data we analyze and can be used to help improve your SEO but on which hard advice would in some circumstances be downright wrong.
So, the idea is that these articles are here to put some context around the information that our tools provide so that you can put that information to use and achieve higher rankings. Two major factors led to presenting this content as a series of articles and blogging to do it. The first was the sheer amount of content that can be written on SEO. It’s simply too big an area to tackle for me to be able to face the idea of putting it all down on paper in one go. The second factor is the changing nature of Search Engine Optimization. There are general principals involved in Search Engine Optimization and there are some things that held true 5 years ago that still hold true now. But, there are also big changes occuring over a period of time and being aware of those changes is important if you are to improve your SEO efforts and make sure that those improvements are long term in nature.
So, the decision is to blog. To present information on Search Engines and on SEO that can inform your actions on an ongoing basis and also, hopefully keep you up to date with the SEO industry. These articles, any advice in them, any opinion in them, should be seen in the context of a much wider body of information and advice and professional development that is available online and off.