What are your strategies for SEO?
SEO is one of those things I understand in principle but have never really thought about in relation to my blog.
In my professional life, we certainly use it. We want to connect people who have particular needs with the services we provide. It makes good sense. But my personal writing begins somewhere quite different.
I write every day as a personal discipline, responding to the daily blog prompt. One of the things I enjoy about this is that it gets me thinking about things I might never otherwise have considered. Sometimes the prompt takes me somewhere unexpected.
At other times, writing is a way of reflecting on something that has made an impression on me. It might be a song, a movie, a podcast, a conversation or a sermon. Something catches my attention, and writing helps me work out why. Often I don’t really know what I think until I’ve written about it. For me, writing is as much about discovery as communication.
I didn’t begin with an audience in mind. Writing was simply a way of reflecting on my life. Eventually, I began sharing my reflections with friends, who encouraged me to start a blog. I thought, why not? If something I wrote helped another person reflect on their own life, that seemed worthwhile.
Gradually, people began reading, including people I’d never met from different parts of the world. That’s been one of the unexpected pleasures of writing. Something from my ordinary life can resonate with someone whose circumstances are quite different.
I’m conscious of those readers and want my writing to be accessible and meaningful. But there’s a difference between adapting your writing to respect your readers and optimising it to attract more of them.
SEO is about helping people find your writing. For me, writing is about finding something I didn’t know I was looking for. So I’m certainly open to suggestions about making my blog easier to find.
And perhaps that’s the irony. I began writing to discover something about myself, God and the world around me. Along the way, other people found me, and sometimes we discover something together.
What are your strategies for SEO?
View all responses
Leave a Reply