Quite a few months ago, I taught myself a lesson that I am relearning every day  I look at my blog stats. Both Google and wp-stats are telling the same tale of great SEO that was a total accident and is now unwelcome.

Yup, I totally screwed up and have been rewarded for it.

On September 13th, 2009, I published a post titled Freelance Writer Or Crack Whore without realizing just how popular crack whores are on the Internet. Every day I am delivered a handful of traffic that has something to do with crack whores or five dollar jobs. But, alas not much in the way of freelancing.

So, I went to do some research on just how well that post was doing in the SERPs, but first I checked out the keyword crack whore and found that there were well over 2,000 search queries yesterday alone. Pretty impressive.

But, as far as the SERPs go, that post is no where to be found in the top five pages on the top three search engines, with the exception of…

…page one on Google, and that was in Google’s Friends In My Social Network feature.

I don’t think I’ll ask which of my friends have been researching crack whores. Just wouldn’t be prudent.

What I will wonder about is whether or not I discovered a niche, and if there is a way I can exploit that niche. Are the affiliate marketing products for crack whores? I wonder what kind of ads Google’s adsense would throw up on the site?

Oh, wait! What about about an eco-friendly market? Green crack whores? Nah, that will most likely draw a crowd looking for fresh on the streets coke heads.

Oh well, whatever the outcome is, I’m sure I will be rewarded another year’s worth of traffic when I publish this post.

© 2010, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.

The last few weeks I’ve been horsing around with a new project which led me to write a lot of  SEO tutorials, only because SEO is a requirement to survive this tangled mess we have gotten ourselves into.

The Internet is crowded and we’re all yelling to be heard but the only ones that hear us when we yell are the ones who are close; our friends. Yet, we have something to say and we want thousands to hear it, damnit!

To be heard, we pay the concierge with keywords, back links, and link wheels to get our words to the booths that sit high above the dance floor. We hope those that sit in those lofty booths will give us a nod and a mention, because one word from those dudes and people will give us a look.

We can use every trick in the book to get thousands of visitors to our blogs, but can we deliver? Seriously, the simple truth about success on the Internet, or anywhere in life, is that we must satisfy a need. We must deliver the goods or we will lose all that we spent.

What is it we must deliver? A solution. We are all marketers trying to service a niche were people are clamoring for relief from some problem. Products, ideas, knowledge, or good old fashioned entertainment, we are all selling something. If we’re good, we get repeat customers. If not, we’ll be kicked to the curb quicker than a homeless chick after a date.

That is the measure of success in life. When we advertise and try to deliver, do people come back on their own? Do they bring a friend the next time?

Sound SEO  practice will deliver sheep, but good solid content will always feed them the sweetest of meals. It is a difficult juggling act, but if we take a good look at a lot of the SEO tools as not part of a separate task of blogging, but as agents of freedom, we can find that writing content is getting to be more like writing than advertising.

If you’re not familiar with some of the tools available to you in your blogs, look around, dig into them. But don’t look at them from the pure Internet geek angle, look at them with your writing heart in mind. If you can do this, you’ll get ears delivered to you AND get them to come back time and time again.

© 2009, Alex Crabtree. All rights reserved.