My last post was about sharing. Sharing stuff that is worth sharing is important and it’s not good to be apathetic about it. This post is about providing stuff that is worth sharing. This is the other side of the coin.
Being original and providing something of value is probably the most critical ingredient to getting anywhere on the web. You just have to come up with something unique to you and meant for human consumption.
You might be tempted to use tricks to get your web page to the top of the search engines but if those tricks involve making your content more palatable to search engine robots than to people your #1 ranking on Google will do you no good.
First of all if you are going to go to all that effort to get people to see it and when they do see it it looks like every other spammy website out there, people with bounce through without even looking at your content. If your trying to promote your book and get fans you won’t win them with a number one spot on Google.
Second people are much better promoters than robots. I once created a forum that never went anywhere. I put one article on it and then Tweeted it. An influential friend of mine liked it and Tweeted it to his friends who Tweeted it to their friends. It was an amazing thing. My website spread like wildfire through the Twitterverse and within an hour I had hundreds of visitors. For weeks I occupied the #1 spot on Google because of this. And even now that defunct forum has a better Google rank than most of my other web pages. All from one article.
If you can make content that people value enough to share you don’t even have to lift an SEO finger if you don’t want to. Google’s robots are trained to ignore tricks and focus on how valuable content is to humans. As a writer you have plenty of valuable content to share with people. Put it out there, do a little simple marketing and you will have a lot more success in your web endeavors than you could ever imagine.
Not only will you find success but you will be giving the Internet something of value instead of being just another person trying to get to the top of Google and get people to buy things–you will be a responsible Social Media citizen.