Rahaf Harfoush sat down to chat with Lee Odden recently about tips and tricks of SEO — Search Engine Optimization – Toprank’s CEO shares tips and Tricks.  Some days I feel like I’m up to my neck in SEO.  Helping bloggers with titles, tags, categories.  Always looking and improving what I think are the “right” things to do.

Lee mentions it in the interview that good, compelling writing is the first step to increasing your blog’s traffic.  I couldn’t agree more, in fact I think good, compelling write helps SEO because as you flex your writing muscles and write descriptively, you naturally use a lot of different keywords in the post.

Well, you should anyway.

This isn’t going to be one of those awe inspiring posts though.  My brain seems to have gone on strike tonight (happens), but one article that really caught my meager attention today was Sarah Perez’s discussion—thesis that maybe we’re doing social media wrong.

Tomorrow I’ll mull and riff on that post, tonight I just can’t, maybe call it pre-reading.

Photo credit: Brian Solis via Flickr

Post from: EveryJoe

Good SEO starts with great writing, but some techie tips help too

I want to be a part of conversations about the topics I am interested in, but I know that I can’t participate in all of them.  However I would like to be a part of the ones that relate to me and the things that I’ve written.

Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb has taken a stab at where to find the various conversations and how to try to follow them:

We’ve seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we’ve questioned whether they’re adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to.

The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up? From: The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere – ReadWriteWeb

I’m still not convinced that this is enough.  I’m in the same camp as Muhammad Saleem with his backing of SocialThing (I did get an invite–thanks CJ!) I’d like to see the conversations stay where they started.  If it starts on Twitter, keep it on Twitter.  If it starts on a blog, keep it there.  Yes, this might be old school, but you know, I think everyone benefits from this.  Comment on a post on FriendFeed?  How many of my readers will find that?  Heck how will I find it?

One of the features I like about FeedDemon and other smart RSS readers is showing me the comments on a post (or at least that there are comments on the post).  Now imagine trying to track that across Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, del.icio.us, Diigo …

Yeah you get the picture.  Solution?  Maybe connecting the services together?  Maybe consolidating the comments?  Cocomment didn’t last long (yes, I know it’s still around), but that was a great effort towards this goal.  Now the situation has gotten worse…maybe we’ll throw our collective hands up and just go back to commenting only on the blog posts?

Naw, that might just be too easy.

Post from: EveryJoe

As the conversation spreads around, how can we follow and participate?