3 posts on Search Engine Optimisation for your Second Life blog
If you’re interested in attracting more visitors to your blog for whatever reason, you may want to check out 3 posts I’ve written for iRez about search engine optimisation:
- Search Engine Optimisation for your blog – Part 1
- Search Engine Optimisation for your Blog – Part 2
- Search Engine Optimisation for your Blog – Part 3
Should you bother with search engine optimisation for your Second Life Blog?
As I stressed in every one of the posts above, my primary aim when writing anything (business and pleasure) is to communicate a message to humans. SEO just helps the search engines understand what I’m writing about. Importantly, no amount of SEO will improve my ability to communicate a message, tell a story, or evoke a response in you, the reader.
Worse, overdoing SEO might at times muddle the impact or clarity of my message. Last, let’s face it, it takes another 5-10 minutes to optimise your post for search engines, and while that isn’t a long time at all per post, it will add up. In the end, it comes down to costs vs benefits, and that’s a choice only you can make.
While it’s always a good idea to write focused posts (which I try to do on both iRez and this blog), the choice to SEO your posts will depend on your goals. You may be writing your posts just for you and your friends, and that’s perfectly fine. To be fair, you don’t need SEO for that.
Alternatively, you may be aiming to
- spread your message to more people
- looking for an ego stroke by increasing your like or follower count
- trying to get more comments
- getting more traffic so you can sell advertising like many Second Life bloggers do.
If you want to generate more traffic for whatever reason (and all the reasons listed above are legitimate), then SEOing your posts is an important and beneficial activity that far outweighs its costs.
And here’s the dirty little secret that SEOs don’t want you to know: it’s not that hard! Also, SEO can be done properly to not dilute your message, or take up too much of your time. Like with most things, it becomes easier with practice. Happy blogging!
Canary Beck 
Your writings about SEO have been very helpful to me, Becky. I’m trying to implement as many of the concepts as I can, but yeah, I am kind of overdoing it atm. I’m determined to improve though.
I suppose my goal is all of those you mention. Once I decided I want to reach out to readers with my blog, it was only natural to want to find ways to find new readers.
I know authors who feel promoting your blog is egotistical and SEO would be like heiracy. But the people whose writing we love must have had to do some promoting of their works at some point in their lives. I don’t believe I have a _Great_ message the world needs to hear, but I do like the whole process of writing and interacting with readers.
Great post, Becky!
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Hi
I will be offering free SEO classes in Second Life soon. If you are interested give me a shout In-World ( User: xovilichter)
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Thanks for asking, probably not as it’s a big part of my day job, and I’m actually keen to get away from it in both lives.
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