Max Gladwell

How blogging has democratized search engine optimization (SEO) and rendered most SEO firms useless. Plus, leveraging the Creative Citizen wiki platform to SEO green products.

In this paper, we’ll demonstrate how blogging and social media have effectively democratized SEO so that not only anyone can do it, but you can do it more effectively than the so-called professionals. We’ll also use Creative Citizen as a prime example of how a wiki-based platform can play a central role in SEO’ing green products.

There are two types of SEO: legitimate and illegitimate. Most SEO strategies mix a bit of both. Legitimate SEO is consistent with the intent of Google’s general rules for ranking search results. To the best of its ability, the Google search algorithm seeks to return results in descending order of relevance for any given keyword or phrase. It’s not intelligent enough (yet) to know this for sure, so it uses a number of criteria to make a best guess. If your website has been legitimately SEO’d, it will be ranked accordingly.

Illegitimate SEO, on the other hand, seeks to fool the algorithm and manipulate the results such that a website earns a higher ranking than it might otherwise deserve. The problem with illegitimate SEO is that the search algorithm is constantly changing in an effort to weight results toward legitimate SEO, which is better for everyone. After all, when you perform a search, you want to get the best and most relevant results. This ever-changing landscape renders illegitimate SEO unsustainable and means that a company needs to continue to pay an SEO firm to try and stay one step ahead of the algorithm changes. Eventually, search technology will surpass illegitimate SEO once and for all. Which will leave only legitimate SEO, and the focus of this paper.

For the purpose of this paper, let’s assume that your company sells a product and that it has a website. Most web designers have basic knowledge of SEO and should build your core pages accordingly. An SEO firm will tell you that you need ghost pages with a bunch of keyword-rich content that no one will ever see. They’ll get you to buy links on other pages to make it appear to the search engines that your site is more important that it is. They’ll convince you that this hokus-pokus is the only way to make your site discoverable. What they probably won’t tell you is that you can start a blog using free software and achieve better, more sustainable results for a fraction of the cost. And if you pursue blogging as a business practice, then this superior form of legitimate SEO will simply be a valuable byproduct.

One of the SEO advantages of having a company blog and organizing your content accordingly is that search engines and blogging platforms go together like peanut butter and jelly. Which is also to say that if you can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you can SEO your own blog. When a search engine crawls a standard web page that hasn’t been properly SEO’d, it doesn’t necessarily know what to look for or what it’s looking at. It makes a best guess. When it gets to a blog, it knows everything it needs to know: title, content, tags, links out, links in, and the ordering of importance. If you use SEO plugins, this gives the search engines a helping hand.

In this regard, blogging serves as an online marketing practice that is perfectly aligned with the intent of search algorithms and SEO. Search engines like to see well-organized and original content that is updated frequently and has links going in and out. That is the essence of blogging. It is why all blog platforms contain blogrolls for sharing links to other blogs and why linking to another blog post generates an automatic pingback or trackback. Instead of buying illegitimate links, it’s much more valuable, sustainable, and cost effective to share them with fellow bloggers and earn them through producing good content that is relevant to your product or business. Unlike paid links, these will actually drive traffic as opposed to simply gaming search results. And it enables you to network with bloggers, who might also want to write about your company or product.

As an example, Max Gladwell has had tremendous success with its organic, legitimate SEO efforts. As of this writing, our post on Green Drinks from two days ago has earned the 16th result for a search on “green drinks” (no quotes), despite never having written about Green Drinks before. As you’ll notice, the keyword Green Drinks can be found at the front of the title and in the sub-title. One should always consider what the top keyword search would be for a blog post and position them accordingly. A search for “Stephen Colbert Sierra Club” currently returns the first result, and a search for “water footprint” returns the 16th (no quotes).

Blogging for SEO is one of the ways to make your product or brand more searchable and discoverable, but the social web offers no limit to the ways that you can “be a beacon” and help your customers find you. In this paper, we explore the green wiki platform of Creative Citizen and how properly listing your product as a Creative Solution can serve as a valuable complement to your SEO efforts.

Creative Citizen co-founder Argam DerHartunian is a seasoned SEO expert with a deep familiarity for both legitimate and illegitimate practices. The Creative Citizen platform can be a powerful tool for helping branded products show up on the first three pages of search results for the general product-category queries e.g. searching for a general term like “solar panel” or “rain barrel” and returning highly ranked, branded versions by way of Creative Citizen.