Being focused…

When I first started this blog, my primary aim was to write content about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Its essentially what this blog and site is all about. The angle from which I write about SEO is that of standards compliancy, there are some very real correlations between achieving web standards and performing well in organic search results. My backgound is in web development and therefore web standards is a natural angle for me to write from.

I also had a number of other secondary aims that I wanted to achieve with the site including; promoting my services (web development, seo and marketing), music reviews and political/social commentary amongst other things. To that end I wrote blog posts on these topics, created content pages (most of which are still visible), had sidebar lists featuring albums I was currently listening to, the list goes on.

Its taken me some months to realise the glaringly obvious – that these secondary areas do not really belong on the site. They dilute the power of my primary aim – to write about SEO, confuse visitors (why on earth are these music recommendations on an SEO site?) and probably do me harm in natural search rankings.

I’ve recently been suffering quite a bit from bloggers block, my posting has been fleeting to say the least and when I have been posting its been fairly ‘matter of fact’ type news reporting – stuff you could easily read on any number of news sites. Incidentally, Randfish did a great post the other day on SEOMoz titled ‘10 Web Tools to Help Generate Blog Content Ideas‘. If you’re a blogger and are suffering from ‘the block’, i’d suggest reading through this post.

I’ve used this period of ‘content drought’ to re-assess what I’m doing with the site. Gone are the music recommendations, the irrelevant book recommendations and any other stuff that isn’t part of SEO or Web Standards. I’m planning to move a lot of the stuff from my services pages off to another site entirely – one that is focused purely on the services I offer, and anything ‘off topic’ will now get posted to my blogger account along with all the other miscellany I post up there.

I think there is still room for some sort of social/current affairs content and I think its good to bring fresh stuff in from time to time as long it is in some way related to the sites core aims. This is something that Aaron Wall does so well over on SEOBook. Every few weeks he’ll do a post on some news item or something from outside the SEO world but it is usually rooted in (or written from) an SEO perspective.

In summary, I suppose what this post is about is being focused and keeping focused, a skill that can be applied to most things (on and off the web), not just SEO blogs! Its a skill that I’m learning slowly but surely.

Now, about this SEO stuff…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 8:24 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.