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Ethan Hampton


No More SEO

I have decided that I don’t want to focus on search engine optimization anymore. Quite frankly it’s too much work for what I gain from it and I seem to be doing just fine without it.

Why the shift? Well I started looking at where and how I find entertaining websites. The only one I found through a search engine in recent memory was https://rogerhub.com and even then it was through his final grade calculator. Websites like Nick Craver’s, Paul Graham’s, Joel On Software, Tiffany Matthé’s, among others, were all found organically from reading other websites or stumbling across them on Twitter.

I don’t think I benefit from people finding my from search engines right now. My most clicked article on Google is The Benefits of Wikipedia, which isn’t exactly the type of content I want to write all the time. It also tends to spike towards the end of school terms, which hints at the type of visitor I’m getting. If new posts that I write happen to rank well, then great! I’m also not generating any direct income as a result of search visits. That’s unlike blogs such as Get Rich Slowly (as an example), that monetize their traffic and need visitors to sustain operations. That model isn’t a bad one, I’m just not using it.

No longer am I going to aim for long posts or write things that will rank well just to please the SEO gods. I do think that longer posts are superior in general, so topics that are deserving will still get more extended writing. My focus will shift towards what I legitimately want to do, quality over quantity. I would rather write one or two well thought out and well edited pieces I actually care about each year than a smattering of those that I don’t.

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