Recently I have been busy with my SEO (Search Engine Optimization) job, and have learnt lots of skills by reading some professional books. During this process the most impressive subject that draw my attention was traffic – a measure that determines the rank of websites and helps them earn money. But if you have some basic knowledge of SEO, you will know many internal and external websites have wrongly used it to bump up their traffic and rank high, and in the process have forgotten what the channel is based on. According to the SEO guidelines of Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines, and those highly-appreciated SEO running books, the channel is based on content. They all agree: content is king.

This is what I have gathered after working in this job and reading books related to this subject. This process has made me aware of other areas too, such as blog writing. In fact, those who have SEO experience must know that it has so much to do with blog writing, but in a different way. Those who write really excellent blogs that tell others how to solve their problems can gain lot of traffic in the long run. While those who always work as spammers will lose in the end, especially when search engines find out that they are cheating they will lower their ranks or completely remove all their links from their search results. Such people just ignore what SEO is based on and only concentrate on gaining traffic.

The two paragraphs above have focused on a field which seems unfamiliar to most of China Daily’s blog readers (If I guess right). This is really weird! However, have you noticed that I addressed content for writing for a blog? I think you must have.

Content is something we always want to get while we, in fact, always ignore it completely. Yes, when I have a thread of thought and no matter how good it is, I wish to blog it and upload it to my blog collection column to show that I can write something that might draw visitors, probably many potential visitors, because I think this way I can satisfy my vanity, a hollow spirit owned by me. So, I forget my initial intent of writing blog posts: writing for great fun, meaningfulness, and excellence. Thus, I am not focused on the content, but everywhere else. Maybe I can gain traffic at this moment, while I think it is very difficult to provide great fun and meaningful stuff to your blog readers, who will leave you and go for others who can do this. So, you are a loser.

And of course, when you have enough traffic your popularity will grow day by day. This is a benign process for every blog writer. However, I still have two concerns. One is your intention to write for popularity by stressing quality content; the other is your deep desire to write only for popularity rather than for anything else, and good content must be kicked off my mind completely or partially. If good content is addressed and one is doing so, that’s understandable and relatively honest, otherwise if someone only writes for popularity and never or seldom thinks about how to offer quality content, this action is not appreciated. Yes, popularity can get us more friends and even money. For common blog writers, this happens not much but still it does happen, while for those writing for SEO, that’s a lot of black hat (a term in SEO to address those who use evil ways to earn traffic) writers.

After my explanation and some different ideas, can you judge which side you really belong to?

The original blog is: http://blog.chinadaily.com.cn/blog-1395221-24008.html