Learning SEO by Doing it Hardcore
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Are you ready to take your SEO skills to the next level? The “learn by doing” approach works best, but what do you do after you’ve done something so many times that it’s automatic? You get out of your comfort zone by doing something a little different and scary that you might not have considered doing before.
Most importantly, you learn from the experience. That’s the focus of this article. As with an earlier article on hardcore SEO, I’m taking my inspiration from Michael Martinez’s "SEO Theory and Analysis" blog. He departed from his “theoretical musings” long enough to give 20 tips. While he didn’t explicitly divide them into which tips would be most helpful for which purposes, I could see certain patterns in some of them. Doing any one of his tips will give an education to any SEO, but the ones I’ve culled for this article stood out for me.
The first one I’d like to cover is actually the fourteenth tip on the list: “Learn how to write Who, What, Where, When, and Why in 4 paragraphs or less.” Maybe education is declining these days, but I can remember learning that in grade school – though I’ll readily admit I might not adhere to it as closely as I should. Still, it’s important to learn the rules well before you break them; when you understand them deeply enough, you’ll know when and how you can get away with breaking them.
It’s the sad routine of what we’re used to seeing that Martinez gives as the reason for learning this hardcore tip. He insists that “you should never write a press release that starts out with, ‘John Schlock Smith the Shmuck proudly announces…’” The two jobs I’ve held longest put me to work reading press releases and extracting the meat for various purposes. I’ve boiled two- and three-page press releases down to a paragraph, and almost all of them began with some variation of Martinez’s tongue-in-cheek quote.
You need to know what’s important in your press release, and you need to be able to write about it both succinctly and creatively. Web surfers have short attention spans, and can be easily distracted. You think they’ll read past your first four paragraphs? They might not even get past the first two! If you want to get through to them, make sure you hit everything quickly. If you want them to keep reading, give them a reason – but don’t try to force them to keep reading by withholding information. There’s a good chance it won’t work.
Next: Old Ground, New Eyes >>
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