Many years ago nobody knew about SEO.
I remember that in my first blogging attempts, all I had to do was give space to my creativity and write whatever came to my mind. I perceived the blogging activities more as a literary exercise, and I never really worried about being found by search engines.
Sadly, nowadays this can almost never happen if you have a blog.
You need to optimize it for SEO all the time otherwise Google will put you on the 30th page of the search or nowhere.
Nowadays, I still do not care about SEO, but just because I accepted and embraced a while ago the idea that this blog will never be neither popular nor profitable.
What is SEO and why does it matter to me?
I can say a couple of things about SEO because I briefly worked in this field a few years back, and willingly or not I had to learn how it works.
Search Engine Optimization is the combination of things you do to make your blog discoverable by Google. This involves a number of different areas, such as:
- On-page optimization – there are a lot of rules for right amount of characters, words, length of the title, optimization of the images, description, repetition of a word, headlines, headers and these kinds of things to improve readability. And then there is the keyword research & how do you put this keyword everywhere and how this really needs to be the best damn keyword.
- Link building – on page (on your blog) & off page (likely getting a collaboration with other desperate people like you that also look for link building because Google has decided so)
- Technical SEO – this is a bit more complicated, but let’s say it involves a few tools like Screaming Frog to assess everything you have on page, checking logs and wondering if you are a developer or why the hell you even need to do this
These are full-time jobs for someone, and just a few of the tasks you need to do if you want to make sure your blog is working fine, and especially, if you want to make sure that Google likes it. If Google says you are not doing things well, your blog will not be shown to anyone, you will not appear in search results so not be discoverable, so kaput.
What happens if I don’t care about all these rules and just write normally?
With all those SEO tasks you need to do to keep your blog up and running, you end the day forgetting you actually have to also write on the blog.
What happens if you, like me, decide you don’t want to spend time on these futile tasks and just ignore the notifications that keep coming saying, for example, that this sentence is too long or that I did not use any keyword so far or that there are not enough images?
This!
You get a blog like this.
A blog that nobody finds on Google. A blog that will never be profitable. A blog that is kindly sponsored by Panos, that keeps paying for it even if I write on it just once in a blue moon (thanks).
But also, a blog where there is freedom of speech! Google, screw your keywords-filled meta descriptions, you will never have me.
June 20, 2024 at 6:39 am
That’s so funny…to read this post after reading your Cape Verde itinerary! I was looking up “2 week cape verde itinerary” and yours showed up on the first page, 2nd one listed…I agree that we should all blog however we want. It’s creative and fun for individual expression. I mean, most people share their travel experiences and life on Instagram and don’t make a dime off of that unless they get sponsors!