I can’t even remember how I came across this blog post on DaveFleet.com but it’s a discussion on whether or not SEO could devalue news releases.

Dave does an excellent job conveying the aspect of SEO sheep within his post.

My problem with this, as with many SEO principles in general, is that people will take it to an extreme. They’ll follow the advice like sheep and will force inappropriate keywords (read: jargon) into their writing, and their products (and clients) will suffer.

Sure, these releases may rank highly for some words but so what? People arrive, see a poorly written release or page, fail to find what they want and leave. It’s a cheap tactic – one that’s no better than spamming people with emails.

When I read that paragraph, I wanted to shake Dave’s hand as that is how I feel about SEO in general. As I’ve always pointed out, SEO is not hard. Why people spend thousands of dollars on an SEO guru is beyond me. I have yet to spend a dime and Jeffro2pt0.com shows up on the first page of search results for things that I have written about. No optimization needed.

As for news releases? I don’t want to read a news release which contains a bunch of keyword stuffing crap. Instead, the release should be relevant, useful and to the point so as not to waste the readers time. Dave hits the nail on the head when he says, “Just Write Well“.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a news release, blog post, book, story, forum post, just write it well and everything else will fall into place. It’s worked for me and no, you won’t have to hire me as an SEO consultant for $500.00 an hour for me to repeat this common sense.

Three golden steps of SEO:

1. Write Well – Writing well can make or break content. The best of both worlds is writing well while injecting a sprinkling of keywords into the content. There is nothing wrong with adding specialized keywords into your content just so long as they don’t take away from the article/release.
2. Be As Relevant As Possible To The Niche You Are Writing About – It’s all about relevancy. From the blog title, meta site description tags and meta keywords, it’s about taking everything your site has to offer and making it relevant towards whatever niche you are writing about. For example, if you are writing a tech blog, don’t write about popculture events or if Brittany Spears is back in rehab. Also, don’t use hundreds of keywords in your meta tag area. This will penalize your site in the search results.
3. Write Unique, Desirable Content – This one is pretty self explanatory. If the content you write is unique, chances are, people will link to it. This creates back links and will propel your content ahead of others. The desirable content is content that your audience wants. Find out what your audience needs and provide that to them. Desirable content will also aide in generating back links if your content covers a wide audience.

Do those three things on a consistent basis and I guarantee you’ll notice a spike in organic search engine traffic.