[rough draft]
I’ve been thinking about content generation lately. Search engines are in the business of finding and organizing information and then presenting the most relevant information they can find to those who are looking for it. Usually when I have anything interesting to say, I put it somewhere like Facebook or Twitter. It’s effective in that it more or less gets the people who follow me, but it does nothing to bring more visitors to my site.
It must be nearly impossible for a small, 5-page site to rank well for any competitive keyword. I’m not suggesting a simple site can’t get a top ranking — I’ve built half a dozen of those sites, and they’re all sitting very nicely in their market, but there is a big difference between holding the top ranking for House Cleaning Rockwall or Rockwall Web Design — neither of which have more than a dozen serious competitors — and getting a top ranking for something like Dallas Web Design which has thousands of competitors.
One of the phrases that has always interested me most is “search engine optimization”, because whoever can rank best for that phrase really is the best at search engine optimization. And the most obvious thing I continue to notice about that phrase is the top results all come from sites that have tons and tons of content and tons and tons of people linking to that content. That is what makes it the best result to show.
And so returning to the topic of content generation, the key to increasing organic traffic and getting a site to rank well is generating lots of content — content that can be indexed and organized, and content which is useful enough to cause others to link to and discuss it.
One of my goals for this site is to have a top ranking both for my name (Richard Morgan) and for the phrase web developer in the context of Dallas, Texas (where I live). Apparently Richard Morgan is a relatively popular name, because last I checked, there were nearly 4.5 million search results for it. Not just that, but there are a number of Richard Morgan’s who have either written books or run for political office, which means tons of sites are already linking to theirs. That sets me behind slightly, but I’m really not too concerned about it. When it comes to my name, it’s really just a matter of time and a little content before I outrank them. Simply having the domain name www.RichardMorgan.com will cause my site to rank a lot higher than many of the others. But my url doesn’t help me when it comes to ranking for Web Developer in Dallas.
There are two key aspects to ranking well. One is to increase the overall reputation of the site, and the other is to increase the relevance and reputation of a page. Ignoring page-specific optimization for now, since there’s really only so much that can be done, increasing the reputation of my site as a whole will pay off for each of the pages I decide to optimize individually.
Ultimately (down the road), the content I write on this site is a marketing tool. The more different phrases and topics my site ranks for, the more ways people can find my site, and the more people who find my site, the higher the chance they hear about and potentially use my services. What this means is that even just writing what little I know about refugees living in Vickery Meadow is a marketing campaign. There’s not a lot of reason to suspect that people trying to learn about the refugee situation here in Dallas are looking for a web developer, but who knows — they could be!
That’s the beauty of it. Simply by writing about all the different things that interest me, I’m creating content and building up more and more content that can be indexed. By writing about my interests, eventually groupings will begin to emerge. For example, if I write occasionally about going to happy hour in uptown, I may start to rank for specific happy hour queries, even if the bulk of my site is about business or web development.
As a result, writing about absolutely anything which interests me is an investment. And the beauty of writing about interests is that with time, hopefully they will develop, and I will begin to have more meaningful, insightful posts. The more meaningful the content, the more likely it becomes that it will further stimulate discussion regarding what I’ve written, again causing people to link to it. So simply by writing, I write better, and by writing better, I create leads and increase my site’s reputation.
As a web developer in Dallas, competing against my peers (and against multi-million dollar businesses) for a really tough keyword, I don’t know of a cheaper, easier way to begin to establish my site’s reputation in such a competitive market.
Conclusion
Ultimately, what I’m considering is that I’m doing myself a disservice to simply post random stuff on Facebook or Twitter. If I truly value my own site and want to begin to develop it and establish a reputation in Google, I need content that can be indexed–content that not only can be indexed but that can generate discussion and lead to others discussing my content. Ultimately, I need to be writing about the things I care about on my own site so that as I gain deeper understanding into all these random things, they will begin to feed visitors into my site and ultimately my interests will fuel my sales.
Disclaimer
Odds are I will be posting a lot of rough drafts. There is actually good reason for it, at least at this point. If I wait to write and rewrite and perfect each topic before posting it, it will take days or weeks for me to get around to completing a single post. I’m too much of a perfectionist to ever be satisfied with less. By simply posting what I have, I’ll solve the content generation problem quickly, and as I develop my points, I’ll begin to refine my writing.