Why You Need To Blog = Accidental S.E.O.

Search Engine Optimization.  It’s been a “thing” since 1997 according to Wikipedia.

Here’s the basic premise. The Internet has close to 1,000,000,000 websites right now. How in this World Wide Web is anyone going to find yours?

Directories were created and that was okay for awhile then this company called Google came along and developed an easy to use simple way to find stuff online.  The modern Search Engine was born and by the end of 1998, techies were praising Google.com:

 “PC Magazine” reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes us as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.

Jump ahead 10 years to 2008 and I’m telling some of my radio clients that they need to blog regularly.  At least once a month, but once a week is better.  At this time, I’ve plunged myself into the blog world with over 3,000 articles I published on my own blogs that year alone, on a part-time basis.

The blog articles I was writing and sharing were being picked up by Google.  Let me explain.  If someone was to do a Google search for something I wrote about, I occasionally would appear on the first or second page of Google.  Now Google is much more sophisticated these days and there are companies that specialize in optimizing websites for Google which still has over 65% of the search engine use market worldwide.  Bing is #2 with around 20% of the market.

When I launched this website four years ago this month, I worked for Cirrus ABS, a website development firm in Fort Wayne and learned a lot of stuff I could be doing S.E.O.-wise for this site, but I didn’t.   I was too busy working at my paid job and writing articles on the side to take the time to add those extras to my articles.

Time Travel with me to December 2013, about 23 months ago.  That’s when I returned to radio to work at WOWO. I was given permission from management to write about WOWO and radio and advertising and marketing and just about anything I wanted because they trusted me.

As I went about my work at WOWO as an advertising sales person who prefers to offer advertising and marketing consulting 1st before the selling part of my job, I started writing about  my experiences with WOWO radio and recently I noticed a trend.

People were paying attention.  Mary, whom I’ve known for a few years was recommending articles I wrote to her clients.  But this month in particular, I was getting phone calls, text messages and emails to my ScLoHo email account from strangers wanting my help with advertising, marketing and some were specifically wanting to advertise on WOWO.  It was time to do some research.

I cleared my cookies and browser history and did a search for WOWO Advertise and was pleasantly surprised.

7 of the Top 10 Google Listings pointed to ScottHoward.me

The first three listings linked to our company website at WOWO.com  But the rest all went directly to articles that I wrote over the past 22 months.

I sent a note and screenshot to my friend Kevin Mullett at Cirrus ABS who decided to investigate further wrote back, Maybe even more impressive.  “radio advertising fort wayne” “fort wayne radio advertising” “fort wayne radio” incognito. Depends on how people are searching.

This is what I call the power of Accidental SEO.  I almost called it lazy SEO but that’s not really what happened because I haven’t been lazy.  I write and publish 5 articles each and every week on this website/blog.  Many of them, but not all mention WOWO.  That’s not being lazy, that’s being diligent.

The reason I called it Accidental SEO is because I didn’t add all the extra tags and metadata that would help Google find me and boost my results.  I just wrote a blog and didn’t stop.

Maybe what I have done isn’t duplicate-able by you.  Maybe it is.  You’ll never know until you start and don’t stop.

If you want to be found online in a more purposeful way, I can help you with that with the services of the Federated Digital Solutions division of  company. Contact me and we will see what is the best path for you.