This guest post is by William Tyree of SEO for Salesforce.
Is it safe for bloggers to stop caring about SEO yet? Can we all just install an SEO plugin for WordPress and focus on creating quality content?
If you read some of the problogger.net articles this year about how Google’s Panda updates sent some bloggers looking for a life boat, the answer is unfortunately no.
In terms of risk mitigation, we all need to be savvier about the way search engines perceive and rank our sites.
We also need better strategies to maintain a competitive edge. For better or worse, online advertisers and PR firms are getting smarter about distinguishing between sites that reach vast, highly engaged audiences and those that connect with smaller communities. When companies send out invitations to lucrative industry blogger events, they have to choose between you and other bloggers.
Relationships play a factor, but so do the sizes of your web traffic and social media reach. Increasingly, advertisers are using independent measurement sites like Compete.com and Klout to verify the size of your impact.
We all know our audiences intimately. But what few of us have is the luxury of time, or the budget, to hire an SEO agency. That’s why experimenting with good SEO automation tools may be a wise bet. SEO automation can’t create great sharable content for you, or define business objectives. But it can help with a lot of other things that you would need to clone yourself or pay someone to do.
For example, a good automation tool can identify problems with your site in a few minutes that an SEO firm might charge thousands to find for you. They can also auto-generate solutions and monitor the impact of your efforts. If you use a CRM to track your sales or contact lists, a few automation tools can even automatically correlate specific keywords to leads coming in from your blog contact form and eventual revenue.
That kind of information makes it possible for you to make smart choices about what niche topics to blog about. For example, if you’re a tech blogger, and you find that every time you blog about 3D TVs you get above average numbers of page views, and many more leads from advertisers, then that might have a strong impact on your content strategy.
This infographic illustrates how using automation tools to handle time-intensive SEO chores helps free up time for web publishers to focus on strategy and content.
William Tyree is VP of Marketing for DemandResults, an evidence-based marketing company and creator of cloud marketing products SEO for Salesforce and RingDNA. He has contributed his stories and thought leadership to Harvard Review, The Atlantic, Japan Inc, YouMoz and elsewhere. He blogs regularly for EvidenceBasedMarketing.net.
Interesting. I found staying on top of SEO but also working more with some of the other things as well like posting on other blogs tend to help the most!
Hello, yes i do agree that seo is still king. posting on blogs helps but search engine optimization rules.
Quite useful inforgraphic. Even after the Panda update, we can not ignore Google due to the amount of traffic it can potentially send to our blogs.
The post does not make any sense to me. I think that whether people are hiring SEO companies to work on their sites or doing it themselves, in both cases they are using automated tools to monitor the performance. One can monitor the performance of SEO efforts but can not automate the SEO process itself. The infographic is much better than the post itself.
@Faizan Elahi: Glad to see you here :)
hmmm Interesting. There will always be some form of manual work involved, but Something not just business owners can use, but also SEO firms, to save time on projects and be more efficient.
besides using seo techniques, I also use social networking sites as a major source of traffic into my blog.
I did it because I still use the basic seo techniques, so that competition in the SERP will be very difficult for me to do.
very nice indeed.learnt alot of things here.and its the best blogging place to learn.
regards
Urdu PoetryBlog Administrator
I am slightly confused about what you mean by SEO Automation. Do you mean by automation that we should just write articles and that let Search Engines do the work for us or follow the process listed in your infographic?
In addition, what are some tools that you recommend for automation and what types of automation tools are there?
My questions exactly…I suppose you’d have to go to the guest bloggers website to have these questions answered…
WAHM Shelley… :)
Great article and while some automatic content syndication is possible we still believe in good old fashioned human interaction and Search Engine Optimization. We received as I’m sure you do comments which are becoming increasingly spammy and they automatically go into the trash can. Thanks to good plugins which automate the spam filtering process. We strive to promote quality content which just cannot be automated. We also recently configure a small business blogging SEO plan just to help bloggers and small business with the rising cost of quality SEO. Hopefully the process will never be automated. I still want the human touch when I am conducting a natural search for something.
it is not safe for bloggers to automate their SEO. I do not agree with search engine automation, because there are so many ways to search engines can find out things a blogger or webmaster is doing, and easily penalize you from search engine results pages, in getting quality targeted traffic to your site.
if anything, the only automation I support is automated social bookmarking using onlywire.com. That’s it :-)
I was slightly confused over the way the term automation is being used.
Though, I would hazard a guess that the article is saying for us to integrate various automation procedures during our usual blog(Website) chores.
From our initial idea, through the research, writing and promoting of that original idea.
We currently are using a great amount of automation, in one way or the other working on our websites.
Though, as others have stated, we still rely quite heavily on manual work application to get the job done.
I have found that personal networking has been more efficient in bringing traffic to my blog. SEO brings a few search engine hits, but to get to my target group shares and guest posts from other photographer seem to drive a lot of my new traffic. A big part of that may have to do with the fact that my blog is more image based than text based creating a difficulty in “Writing” content. A picture is only worth a thousand words to the human eye, not to the googlebot.
Hmm… automation can be useful, but some people take it to extremes. At the end of the day, providing value for users is what wins…
I’ve not seen software that automates the process of making a post SEO friendly/compliant, though there are some good ones out there that tell you if you’re within the realm of complying.
But here’s an oddity to ponder: There have been a few posts on my website that have taken off, on their own accord, that have ZERO SEO applied. Just words, no anchor text, no cat links, just words. It’s a bit befuddling, considering all the hype about SEO. But am I brave enough to try this on a consistent basis?
Bloody heck no!
Info graphic gives good information in this blog post ,Now Days to monitor the performance of the website every one is using Automated tools,SEO process is mostly done manually.
what is automated tools its like a SEO Quake or what ?
I really like the design of your infographic. I do some automation, but try and keep my hand in everything too so that my eggs aren’t all in the same basket.
I think it’s still safe to use seo automation on low level tasks. But to fully depend on it will take you and your business nowhere. Search engines are becoming so smart and relying on years of experience and knowledge will be always be your greatest asset. Learned it the hard way. I got blinded by them tools and got penalized big time. So yeah, SEO is here to stay. Great post! Thanks!
I’m intrigued by your post as I think that automation works well with news sharing on sites like Twitter, so you get to spend more time In engaging with your peers on the Social Web. Now, if what you meanT by automation is posting content made by any article spinning software out there, I’d pass. Content rules these days and keyword density is pretty much… dead.