Last week at Pubcon in Las Vegas, I took part in a session titled "5 Bloggers and a Microphone." Since then, we've heard a fair bit of feedback that people were disappointed in the session, mainly because the questions we were asked didn't allow us to impart any good blogging knowledge. As was reported in many different places, one attendee asked an in-depth paid search question which none of us were at all qualified to answer. The discussion often veered towards Twitter, and we spent the first portion of the hour talking about the U.S. election.

From the perspective of someone on the panel, it was minorly frustrating not to be asked more challenging questions. Both panelists and speakers missed opportunities to get into difficult, controversial or interesting discussions. In the future, panelists should arrive with three or four key points that they'd like to discuss, and they should compare notes beforehand to avoid overlap. In Q&A-focused sessions, panelists often rely on the moderator and the audience to provide all the material: we're basically led to believe that this is going to satisfy up to ninety minutes of content. Sometimes it does, but when moderation, audience interaction or panelist-involvement fails, you're left staring at a room of tired conference attendees who want information and entertainment that you are ill-prepared to provide.

Towards the end of the session, we received some good questions; however, there was plenty of room for improvement. It should take less than forty-five minutes for a panel to get going about such a hot topic. It would be a shame to write the panel off, as it has a lot of potential to be informative and entertaining. Unofficially, I suggest we be allowed to show up with a drink in hand... and is that such an odd request, given that it's Vegas?!

Blogging certainly has its place in the SEO world. For better or for worse, many SEOs have found notoriety through publishing online. We've certainly seen big rewards from the activity on our blog, and we know that there are more opportunities to be had in the future. Despite the fact that many of the industry's best search engine optimisation professionals don't blog, we have a culture of online publishing. A successful blog is one catalyst to being recognised, respected and offered business. It is not, however, a simple task to maintain a viable blog and sometimes it's downright agonising.

Here's what I would provide as discussion points or questions if faced with a panel of bloggers... And here are my replies, because I like talking to myself in an empty room!


How on earth do you find new things to blog about every day or every week? There is so much back-scratching, in-fighting, speculation and repetition in all circles of bloggers. Surely your blog is no better than the next one, and in fact, it might be worse.

It might be. As I said in my second session at Pubcon (Community Hacking: 96 Baiting Strategies You Can Employ), blogging has liberalised and liberated publishing to the extent that any idiot can do it. You may well be an idiot. I'm most likely one too. I didn't have to get a degree in anything to write online, and half the things I write probably mean that my English degree should be revoked.

"Finding something to write about" rarely works for me. I either have something to say or I don't, and when I look at my inventory of posts here, I can clearly see when I wrote because I wanted to and when I wrote because I thought I had to. I am lucky in that, if I don't write, someone else here will. However, I understand the panic faced by blog owners who don't have multiple writers at their disposal.

My best advice is that if you don't have anything to blog about, either don't write, or don't be afraid to write something humourous, personal or otherwise out-of-the-ordinary. I've attempted to pull good advice out when it's really not there to begin with. Works about as well as a stuffed meta keywords tag in the poker SERPs.


How do you deal with trolls?

Here's one no blog owner wants to touch. Calling somebody a troll is a dangerous game. People accuse bloggers and webmasters of covering their own shortcomings by singling out critics and labeling them trolls. The fact is, however, that offensive people do roam the Internet in search of trouble.

We've banned people on this site before (and I'm not talking about spammers). It takes a lot of terrible behaviour to accurately label someone a troll: a lesson I've learned by doing it inaccurately a couple of times. Set rules for what constitutes trolling or offensive behaviour on your blog and develop a warning system. We've published our blog etiquette policies, and it's useful to have them "on paper." Personally email people who break your rules and kindly point out your policies. Employ an "x-strikes and you're out" rule and stick to it. Don't publicise the banning. It's not a medal of honour and you only invite the troll to return from a new IP. From my experience, both here and (more so) when hearing about other people's problems, trolls don't return after they've been banned. If they do, they don't stay for long. Don't celebrate them and give them reason to rejoin the discussion.


Great, so I have a place to impart my undoubtedly incredible knowledge. What else is a blog good for?

During Community Hacking: 96 Baiting Strategies You Can Employ, I was asked to talk a little about how we drive links and eyeballs to our site via the blog. It seems to come as a bit of a surprise to many people that blogs aren't just good for writing up advice. Some other things we've done with our blog include:

• Linking to larger projects, such as the Search Rankings Factors, Web 2.0 Awards and our SEO guides. It's a huge mistake to launch projects and not link to them from a more prominent area. Blogs are easy to keep track of, frequently indexed and generally incredibly SEO-friendly. If a site has no blog, giving new content maximum visibility is a lot harder.
  
  
  
  Screen shots of screen shots. Only on a blog, people.
  
  
• Another thing we've done recently is re-write our Beginner's Guide to SEO via blog posts. When they're complete, we'll compile the individual posts (read: chapters) into one document, relaunch the guide and 301 redirect all the blog posts to the finished article. Thus, we've been actively building links to a document that is still under construction. Once it's finished, we'll add those new links to those of the old document. This isn't only good for severely outdated articles (do we advocate reciprocal links and submissions to Lycos in there?! It's about that old!). Any project that you'd like to build over time could be released in this manner. Just remember the redirects in order to avoid looking like the grand master of duplicate content.
• We've done this to an extent (although I don't recall specifically doing it for link building purposes), but deciding how to handle comments is great for driving links. Sometimes, the comments are what people link to! Think of Sphinn, a social news site with hardly any original content... aside from user comments. People link to Sphinn pages when they want readers to vote on their content, but they also link to noteworthy comment threads. No matter how boring your blog post, interesting comments can still drive some links.
  
  On the other hand, closing comments forces people to talk about you elsewhere. It would be stupid to talk about a post and not link to it, so they'll also throw you a link while they're discussing what you wrote. Win! Of course, they could be horrible and nofollow your link, or copy and paste your URL, but very few people are willing to be this much of a tool. Bloggers must decide when comments should be open or closed. I have no solid figures on this, but it seems that ninety percent of blogs allow comments.

Mind your language, young lady. Or should you?

We've used some choice language on here more than once. The person charged with writing the Bank of America's corporate blog (no, I doubt such a beast exists) shouldn't be cursing up a storm, but the odd swear word here and there isn't going to hurt. They say that swearing is a sign of a lazy vocabulary, but I tend to take great care with my choice of profanity and if it adds to the conversation, I'll use it. We do it very rarely (I believe Rand got, for want of a better term, a lot of shit for it once), but the rest of us have dropped in some language that our grandmas wouldn't like as well. However, unless the blog is supposed to be a Cracked.com-style catalogue of all things terrible, avoid using curse words as commas.


Should you care about your audience?

This sort of came up during the session, and I noted that audiences change a lot over time. Very few of our daily commenters from 2006 are still active participants now. It would be wrong to mourn the loss of these people, some of whom still visit and comment from time to time, but I agree that caring about a blog's audience is essential. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that it will change. Also, people who don't take part anymore aren't necessarily not reading, and their reasons for backing away aren't necessarily a negative reflection on you our your writing. Lisa Ditlefsen recently mentioned to me that she used to spend a lot more time reading and commenting on SEOmoz than she does now. However, it was her life and schedule that changed, not her respect for us or our content.

Blogs, forums and other online groups worry that older members won't welcome new members, but blogs' ever-changing audiences suggests that this isn't a huge problem. At SEOmoz, people make themselves known pretty quickly and, aside from the aforementioned trolls, newly active members aren't ignored or rejected.

Short version: yes, care about who reads the blog and recognise that they make your efforts worthwhile. However, realise that no audience is permanent.


I really hope that Pubcon brings back the 5 Bloggers and a Microphone session again next year. The only thing it needs is some extra structure, both from panelists and moderators. If Pubcon wanted to really push the Q&A aspect of the panel, they should consider adopting an SMX-style question format where audience members email or text in questions. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that a room full of SEOs and online marketers would rather write down their questions than deliver them via microphone! Would extra structure and some better-conceived questions save this session? And what would you ask a table full of search marketing industry bloggers, aside from "what time is Search Bash?"