Today, I’m guest posting at BlogSalad, writer/designer Ron S. Doyle’s online home. Doyle redesigned WordCount last fall, and that’s the subject of my guest post – What Not to Wear, Blog Edition. While I’m over there, Doyle’s filling in for me here.
When Michelle asked to swap posts with me today, I immediately panicked. With every post, WordCount hits its readers with something useful, pragmatic, informative, or controversial. Me? I like pictures of apes:
So, instead of me rambling at all of you about the essentials of interaction design or creating a literary arc with your social media marketing strategy, and instead of making a mess of Michelle’s blog and redesigning it while you watch, I decided WordCount readers deserved something more. Something that, when they read it, would make them really, really happy.
And when I think happy, I think Gretchen Rubin.
Okay, really, I think about my wife and daughters and monkeys throwing Frisbees and low-sugar cereals.
But when I think about writers who are experts on the topic of happiness, Rubin definitely tops the list. She’s the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project, a book that chronicles her year-long journey through hundreds of happiness experiments based on centuries of philosophy and science on the subject.
Whoa. Back up. I’m being a little dishonest here and got sidetracked for the sake of good connecting sentences between paragraphs.
Here’s the real reason why I interviewed Gretchen Rubin: she’s a naughty, naughty blogger.
No, not that kind of naughty. Stop Googling “Gretchen Rubin naked.” Come back here and pay attention.
Rubin is “naughty” because she’s a world-class blogger on the very successful Happiness-Project.com and countless other major sites — and doesn’t worry [gasp!] about search engine optimization.
During an online forum discussion about SEO and duplicate content, a fellow writer once noted that Rubin posts identical content on her personal blog and her Psychology Today blog. According to SEO mavens (despite the fact that Google openly denies this) duplicating content on multiple sites is a big no-no because search engines penalize sites that do.
In my interview with her on Monday, Rubin told me she cross-posts content on Psychology Today, her top-rated Huffington Post blog, Yahoo! Shine, and Divine Caroline, among several others. Her penalty? According to Compete.com, Rubin’s personal blog receives an average of over 65,000 unique visitors per month. Say it with me: 65,000 uniques.
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s on a blog that has a hyphen in the domain name — because even way back in 2006, http://happinessproject.com and http://thehappinessproject.com were already taken. In some circles of SEO “mavenry,” saying you have a hyphen in your domain name is like saying you have herpes on your, ahem, you know what.
Here’s a little from my interview with Gretchen:
Ron Doyle: So you were doing this big happiness project, mostly just for you, but then you started a blog. When and why did you start blogging?
Gretchen Rubin: In March 2006, I was working on the part of my happiness project dedicated to the theme of work and I wanted to test the theory that happiness comes from doing novel and challenging things, so I started a blog. But they wouldn’t sell me the domain name, so yeah, I have a hyphen. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I asked a friend for help. They told me to use Typepad, so I did. They said post every day. That was more than I had planned, but I did it anyway. I didn’t have images on the blog for months. But that’s what great about blogging — you can start simple, add bells and whistles later, and step up your game as you gain confidence. Some people, who knew more about SEO than me, asked, ‘Are you worried about this?’ I decided early on that I’m not going to worry about it. There were so many things that I could have worried about. Instead, I focused on one of my mantras, ‘Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.’ If I had an opportunity to put myself on a quality site, I did it.”
Doyle: So there was never a point in your evolution as a blogger where you were worried about SEO?
Rubin: Oh, sure, I was interested, I still am a little. I always wonder in the back of my mind if I’m doing the right thing. But I attended a presentation on the topic and the SEO expert there said that search engines like Google are constantly changing their algorithms to stop people from manipulating it, so it’s hard to know what hurts or helps. Instead, I do what makes sense from an audience perspective.
Doyle: That’s a really refreshing way of looking at the world of blogging. So many new bloggers want a magic formula to success — and that’s often SEO. But you’re saying that writing content people want to read is all that really matters. What tips then, if any, do you have for other aspiring bloggers?
Rubin: I don’t really worry about search. But I do worry about internal links, ways to get readers to dig deeper. I don’t really worry about keywords, but I stay focused on my key topics — friends and happiness, for example. If you get 100,000 new [readers] coming in from search and only 1 percent stay, that’s still great. But I think you should pay more attention to shout-outs from similar blogs, because people coming from those places will become loyal readers. And I think paying attention to your returning readers is most important if you want your blog to grow and be energetic.
Ron S. Doyle is a Denver-based freelance web designer and magazine writer. You can see more of his work at his new blog, Psychology Today’s You 2.0, an exploration of technology’s effect on identity and personality. He also writes a humor blog about design at BlogSaladBlog.com.
Good interview. I agree with Rubin 100 percent. And I love your profile shot. You picked the one I picked! 🙂
She’s definitely a contrarian but makes some good points.
And I like that picture of R.S.D. too.
Michelle
Excellent article – I laughed and I learned a couple things.
I agree with Rubin, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t study Google Analytics to see what keywords my visitors used to find me. Sometimes I think SEO is hopeful-thinking combined with morbid curiosity:)
Ron’s a funny guy, as his BlogSaladBlog.com work shows.
Michelle
1.) Content matters.
2.) Stick to your subject.
Thanks for this introduction to Rubin’s blog, with which I was not familiar. I wonder if her topic is part of the reason for, how many? 60,000 unique views per month? That’s tough to achieve when you write about a place, even an extraordinarily beautiful place like Wellfleet. Let’s see. If I have 200/day, x 30 = 6000. That certainly puts 60,000 in perspective. 10 times as many. Did the blog get as many hits before the book became a best-seller, I wonder?
The book hit shelves in December 2009. Before that, the blog was averaging 40-50K unique visits per month. In January 2010, it topped 100K.
According to SEO Book’s Keyword Search Tool, “happiness” only gets ~1500 searches per day on Google. For comparison, “Angelina Jolie” gets an average 56,000 searches per day.
That suggests the keyword “happiness” may not be the secret to Rubin’s success after all. Her engaging marketing approach, on the other hand…
I LOVE reading this…Go Gretchen. Thanks for sharing this. And Ron, I so appreciate your comment about Google being hopeful thinking combined with morbid curiosity…perfect.
I’d love to take credit, but that was Sara Lancaster who wrote “Sometimes I think SEO is hopeful-thinking combined with morbid curiosity:)”
The rest, like the part about naked Gretchen Rubin, yeah, that was me. Speaking of morbid curiosity…
Not thinking about SEO and not engaging in SEO-friendly practices are two different things.
Rubin wasn’t consciously pursuing a search optimization strategy, but a lot of what she was doing was extremely helpful in that regard. Her effort to become ubiquitous led her to post her blog content and, one would assume, some other content on a variety of third-party sites. Most of those efforts created backlinks to her site and those backlinks are the currency of off-site SEO.
We also know that search engines appreciate frequent updates and new content. The fact that she was updating her Typepad on a daily basis was SEO-friendly, too.
You can generate traffic without a great deal of SEO-influenced behavior if you’re writing great material that people want to read and share. However, that only works if someone is reading you in the first place. Rubin was creating that necessary foundation all along, even if it wasn’t really intentional.
After that foundation was in place, her content took over. People could find it and read it. Then, they could add to her backlink portfolio by sharing it.
This interview is great because it reminds readers that algorithm studying and link creation scheming isn’t always necessary. You need to do what it takes to be seen and then, if you’re doing something great, everything else will fall into place.
SEOs will tell you that they could increase her traffic dramatically with a few tweaks and changes in terms of site structure. They might be right, too. On-site SEO does have value and it’s not something one should completely ignore if he or she is interested in maximizing traffic.
However, Rubin shows that you can build an audience without getting so wrapped up in the minutiae of SEO that it compromises your writing. That’s something every writer (and every webmaster) should keep in mind.
Well put Carson, and means a lot coming from someone as experienced in writing and SEO as you are.
Michelle
I agree with Carson here. You don’t have to intentionally use SEO methods to benefit from their use. After all, Google’s attempting to provide good links.
SEO gets a bad reputation sometimes when clients force a writer to use what they think are effective SEO methods, which can lead to bad writing. Many of the clients who ask for “SEO articles” also pay very little, so they don’t get good articles anyway.
Great interview, Ron. It’s nice to read about someone focusing on content rather than how to game search engines, though I agree with Carson that Rubin was smart in laying the foundation for folks to find her stuff all along.
Btw, I like the personal pic you ultimately chose as well. Kind of captures the spirit of your writing.
Yes, I do think Carson’s right—what Rubin does, whether she assigns it an acronym or not, is good SEO behavior.
Rubin focuses on brand salience, getting her name out there, increasing brand awareness. On the internet, that involves backlinks, internal links, interaction with other sites, self promotion on multiple platforms, and yes, just plain good content. There are many more humans involved in the site evaluation process at Google than most folks realize; those humans possess the capacity to evaluate content that improves the internet from that which drags it down.
Most importantly, SEO is not some form of prestidigitation, some magic potion, despite dozens of internet hacks getting rich off of ebooks that claim the contrary. It is (or should be) synonymous with good marketing practices.
Carson, I like how you put this. You make SEO seem like a less foreign object that I avoid because I don’t quite understand it and want to mess it up. You make it seem more understandable. Thanks.
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