Darren Rowse, the top blogger in the world perhaps, has a Google Plus post on SEO.
While I once did spend more time on SEO (particularly on structuring my site right, getting keyword density up, interlinking my posts lots and quite a bit of researching keywords) I've increasingly found more value in working on other areas of my business and have found that the result in doing so has been that SEO has to some extend looked after itself....... more search traffic to my blogs .. direct traffic, traffic from social, referral traffic .. Understanding the needs, problems and challenges of readers (and potential readers) is key. ..... you're writing on topics people are searching for, it means that when they find your content they are content with it and are more likely to share it (link to it) - all of which helps to increase search rankings/traffic. .... I work hard and getting inside the heads of my readers by surveying them, running polls, running focus groups, asking questions and giving them space to share what they are doing, learning and struggling with. All of these gives me a fantastic picture of how I can serve them better. ...... the creation of content that is both relevant and useful. This is a daily process of writing, commissioning our writers with assignments and editing their work. ..... ensuring high quality of work but also keeping the quantity up .... More articles mean more doorways into the site. ..... Community - giving readers ways and spaces to engage with you and one another brings a blog alive. .... a reader who feels a sense of belonging is much more likely to be sharing links to your blog than one who never interacts .... I spend a lot of time monitoring our site 'outposts' (Facebook, Twitter etc), creating community centred content (discussions, homework/challenges), focusing our team upon our forum area and investing into customer service (I have a dedicated team on this). .... the dPS Email strategy. .... That blog was well optimized for Google and naturally ranked well. The result was 90% of our traffic was Google traffic. All was good until the day came when Google changed its algorithm and the blog all but disappeared from Google. ...... for the next 6 weeks 90% of my traffic (and income) disappeared. It came back almost as quickly as it disappeared 6 weeks later but the experience taught me an important lesson - to work on other traffic strategies. ..... the graphic with the regular spikes and troughs pattern. The troughs are weekends and the spikes.... are newsletter days. .... Our newsletters drive massive traffic to the site. .... While I wouldn't want to loose the search traffic - the site is now at a point where we wouldn't need it to survive because we can now drive our own traffic each week. .... We now have 100,000 Facebook likes on dPS and it too is sending more and more traffic than previously. The same's true for Twitter and even sites like Pinterest. ..... diversifying our focus on multiple forms of traffic (particularly those we have complete control over like email) gives us a much much much stronger foundation than if we only focused our time and energy upon SEOIn short.
(1) Actively seek to understand your reader's needs.
(2) Write quality and quantity.
(3) Build community at the blog. Hello Disqus.
(4) Email/newsletter can be powerful. Facebook and Twitter are useful.
's growth had plateaued. What could 
do to reach the masses and end up with hundreds of millions of people using the service? Simplify, simplify, simplify. Right now it is so easy to get lost in the service when you are a new user. You first start out by not believing something worthwhile can be said in 140 characters. That is too brief. You may be do not desire to share with the world what you had for lunch. You might not know who to follow. The people you personally know are not necessarily the people with the most interesting 
. What's a 
anyway? 
has to evolve as a service. A stangnant basic service that is hoping to only scale will not cut it. 
at once will have to become 
's growth has been how primitive the search function at the site is. I can't even get it to deliver to me 
I posted several months ago. And all those 
reside on 
's servers.
necessarily has to grow and eat into its ecosystem. That is how 
. The 
engulfed the nearby planets and grew. 
had become unmanageable for me. The 
feature I like, but I can see why it has generated much controversy. One big reason is the old way you could edit the tweet before retweeting it. To that I say, you can still choose to do it the old way. 
's 
page weeks ago, I saw the mistake they were making. They were basically using 
to collect votes for the hottest news articles for that day. That is only one of many uses of 
does a much better job of bringing me the news for the day. And it is not true 
is doing 
on does not quite cut it.
account has to be the starting point for my 
experience. And one thing could add to that experience more than any other: the ability to 
all tweets that might have ever been posted. I should not have to use 
. I should be able to store all links of interest to me right there on 
, and I used to do that. Then 
stopped delivering.
, just like 
is going to have to make sense of 
search is going to be able to read tweets, and make sense of a large number of tweets with the same keywords to give me a feel for what the masses are thinking and feeling. Right now I don't have that. Show me on one screen what the masses are saying in a million tweets. Where is that search and display function?
is not just for now. Real time archives are also valuable. Tell me how 
supporters felt about 
in the summer of 
. Collect all the tweets on the topic and make sense of them all for me. 
talks, and 
does not have enough of it to truly get ambitious as a basic feature of the web experience. I still think 
should go for an 
so it will have a billion dollars to become what email would be if it were designed today. Maybe it will not be 
. It still can be.
has had a scalability problem because it has not had 300 million dollars to pour into its 
. 
has to be always on if it can be part of the basic 
of our web experience. 
were invented today, it would not have a subject line. I would not need your 
address to be able to send you an 
. The 
would always be short. I should be able to read a million such emails in less than a minute. A celebrity should not feel overwhelmed by all the emails she gets because the search feature is so good. Because 
makes sense of a million tweets on the same topic in as much time as Google takes to deliver search results. Well, 
does not, not now.
DM is a joke. You have so little control over it. I get so much 
, I stopped reading DMs months ago. 
trending topics list is so feature poor, it is not even 
. I should be able to do 
with that list. I should be able to do topics, and sub topics, and sub sub topics with that list. I should be able to have a trending topics list based only on my followers. The trending topics list needs to be a full blown 
. 
today is not all it can be. If 
is going to end up with a billion users, it is not going to be the ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_s-NwNHzS-EMiXp7gAqJw1u-vMtdPk9Q0lPyt7VihfPazRWHV90bDIGjpOfOcA4HZJgmDDu-09VcP2LUReFGVtJlfIpdAvGuoH_vluud82mkjaEAA8Dc8hzyGl9nDTETQWsEJuW9XY8zT-JnDENHOWw=s0-d)