I ran into Larry Easto's blog post How To Get Your Web Pages On Page 1 of Search Engine Reports with quite a dose of (healthy) skepticism. I thought that that should be just another 'expert' offering to promote your site and guranteeing that no matter what crap you have, to push it onto the the 1st page of Google.
Let me say that I was very pleasantly surprised. The best part of it is that his message is very clear and it makes sense. I then went to another Larry's blog post You Cannot Ignore Demand and he did not dissapoint me again. On the contrary.
I laughed when I read "When it comes to writing content, we put on our experts' hats, ignore Internet users' relative demand and proceed to write good content that we think will satisfy our target audience."
I remember my young friend, - a very clever and resourceful graduate of Oxford Master's program, - calling me and saying he was going to Florida. We made arrangement that he would take a day off Disney Parks and would spend it with us. He told me that he would gladly sit with me and look at one website, which I was playing with at that time.
When we sat together, I started explaining to him what and how I was doing it, seeking the fine-tuning suggestions, but he stopped me there and asked to turn off the site. Then he asked me if we could write him a list of questions that people ask us.
No problem. We sure can, and we did. Then he asked whether we could get not what we remembered, but actual questions. I asked everyone in the office to go through their e-mails and write every question no matter how stupid they were. When we got several pages, we grouped them and deleted identical or similar questions. Now we had a good list. Then he compared it to the list that we wrote when he asked us to put the list of questions together.
Well, they did not exactly match. Then he turned to the site and asked me if we were answering these direct questions... anywhere...
We did not.
I am glad I ran into Larry, as he is a good reminder to watch and not slide into the expert mode that we so much enjoy...
Larry got a new subscriber
* Image courtesy of Flickr.com under Creative Commons license
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