What do you do when you want to showcase your SEO skills on a famous blog, and the blog owner won’t let you in? For John Doherty, SEO consultant for Distilled, the answer is to show them exactly what they’re missing. He’s just performed a fantasy site audit for writer Geraldine DeRuiter’s travel blog The Everywhereist (rated one of TIME’s best blogs of 2011) – and the result is an exhaustive array of recommendations on tags, keywords, information architecture and URL structure.
Is DeRuiter taking his advice? Not a bit of it – and we’re guessing Doherty knew this would be the case before he even started. DeRuiter has been pressured by her husband to improve her site’s SEO for years now, and she’s consistently dug her heels in. Did we mention her other half is Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz? ‘Nuff said.
(De Ruiter’s typically wry comment: “Aww, thank you, John! This was super interesting and so sweet. I’m obviously not going to implement any of these changes, because SEO is weird.”)
Image: See-ming Lee
Mike –
Fun writeup here. I hope that Geraldine will take some of my advice (spoiler alert: she is) and also that my audit of her site will be beneficial for others who are starting their own travel websites! Since SEO is something that really should be baked into the process from development and moving forward, I hope people find more success in getting their writing found because of my recommendations!
John
Thanks for stopping by, John – and for creating such a useful resource for us in that post. :)
So, can you ‘fess up which of your suggestions Geraldine has decided to heed?
I don’t know if it counts as taking John’s advice, since I was already planning on doing it anyway, but I’m planning a site redesign (yes, I am! YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!) and one of the features I will include is a “related posts” section at the bottom of every individual blog post. So I am taking John’s advice, though coincidentally.
However, if you are NOT like me, and actually want to give SEO a try (and believe me, you should) John’s advice is fabulous and amazing. He’s a smart guy and very talented.
Before worrying about SEO, a blogger should think about something more basic: having a focused topic that will attract and hold readers. If Jane Blogger has a critical mass of content about camping, cruising, or Kuala Lampur, her pages are likely to rank higher in search engines than they will if her blog is about a generic topic like “bravel” or “my round-the-world trip.” Just as important, readers who are interested in camping, cruising, or Kuala Lampur are likely to read more pages than they’d do if Jane had only a page or two of content on the topic that brought the reader into the blog.
JUST what I needed right now. An SEO kick in the pants. Now, to find the time to implement it all (I don’t even have the time to post right now). Oh ToDo list …