Earlier today I had a debate via instant messaging with another blogger who
told me that Search Engine Optimization doesnt make any difference any
more. They argued that you just need to provide good content and search
engine rankings look after themselves.
While I see where the blogger comes from and I agree to a point that search
rankings look after themselves when you build a useful blog - Im also
convinced that knowing some basic SEO and implementing it on a site can
have a significant impact.
What youre looking at above is the search engine referred traffic over the
last two months on my digital photography forum. The blue line is the last
month and the green line is the month before that.
You can see quite clearly that around 25th June something happened to
change the amount of search engine traffic arriving on the forum.
What happened? I simply installed a plugin called VBSEO. Its a plugin for
VBulletin (the platform I use to run the forum) that simply makes the forum
more search engine friendly. It does quite a few things including changing
the url structure of the forum to include keywords rather than numbers.
Within a day or two we noticed search engine traffic increasing. In the
period you see above search traffic is 35.98% higher than in the last month
than the proceeding one (that includes the first half of the month when the
difference wasnt massive). In fact over the last week search traffic has
been up by 69.66%!
Now it is worth saying that Vbulletin is not well set up for SEO in its
default form (in fact its pretty bad) and that most blogging platforms are
better optimized in their default form - however I think its pretty clear
from the above graph that SEO does have an impact.
Further Reading: check out our Search Engine Optimization Tips for Bloggers
for more specific details on how to optimize a blog for search engines.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
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