Does…someone involved with Engadget work on SEO (search engine optimization)?

No. We don’t do any SEO. I don’t believe in SEO.

–from the interview in Michael Banks’ book Blogging Heroes with Peter Rojas, founder of Engadget–a site whose Googe rankings most Web publishers would kill for.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t discount traditional search engine optimization techniques out of hand. At their best, they can help, and there are such things as poorly-optimized Web sites that don’t get all the traffic they could.

But SEO of the traditional sort is one one of a long list of things you can do to introduce people to your conent. And for most sites–especially smaller ones–I’m convinced that it’s nowhere near the top of that list.

Technologizer is a far smaller tech site than Engadget, but it’s growing rapidly–in September, its second full month of operation, it received around 400,000 unique visitors who generated 950,000 page views. (That’s according to WordPress Stats; I also use Federated Media’s tracking pixel and Google Analytics, both of which report numbers which are a bit lower…which is a subject for another post.) I’ve done almost no traditional SEO, other than to pick a platform (WordPress) that’s SEO-friendly in the first place and to remember to use the names of things I write about in the headlines (tricky, huh). Despite that, I’m doing fine in Google results, sometimes outranking humongous sites that lavish attention on SEO.

Here’s why:

–Google is not an idiot. It is, in fact, generally remarkably smart about figuring out the topic of your content. Stuffing your pages with keywords in a desperate attempt to rise to the top of its rankings is the equivalent of shouting at an intelligent friend at the top of your lungs.

–The best way to rise to the top of Google results is to write something useful that nobody else has. Especially if your site is small and/or new. It’s certainly a faster strategy for success than trying to be the Internet’s top site for a search like “notebook reviews” or “health,”  which will put you in competition with major sites that have a decade’s head start on you. Example: RealNetworks’ RealDVD was released today, and if you Google for “RealDVD Review” you’ll find–at least as I write this–that Technologizer’s review is the top one on Google. I didn’t accomplish this through brilliant SEO. I accomplished this through being one of the few people who bothered to review a signficant product from a large company, and posting my review last week in order to get a head start.

–Search engines may not be your best source of traffic. My strategy with Technologizer wasn’t to be on the front page of Google–although I am, in many cases–but to be a site that started conversations that other bloggers and sites would find interesting enough to link to, and which had traction with news aggregtors and social media sites such as Google News, Techmeme, Slashdot, Digg, Macsurfer, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Hacker News. Traditional SEO doesn’t help here and can actively damage your site’s chances of success, since it may lead you to dumb down your content and render it bland and generic. Who wants to link to a site that’s bland and generic? It’s far more important to write for people than for machines.

–Getting linked to by sites other than search engines is the best kind of SEO. Google’s whole PageRank algorithm was founded on the idea that the search engine should emphasize sites that a lot of other sites link to. Focus on doing stuff that other people like and want to link to, and your Google results will improve correspondingly.

–Google enjoys foiling tricky attempts at SEO. In some cases, it and other search engines actively work to ignore techniques that SEO firms recommend. And if Google decides to do something, it usually succeeds.

–Nobody knows anything. William Goldman said that about the movie business, but it’s equally true of SEO. Google does disclose some techniques that will help your cause, and it makes sense to know them. But for the most part, it’s secretive about its special sauce–and that special sauce’s recipe is subject to continuous change. Devote a lot of energy to applying a surefire SEO technique to your site, and Google may make a change that renders it irrelevant before you’re done…if it ever worked in the first place.

I said this a few sentences ago, but it bears repeating: It always, always, always makes sense to concentrate on writing for people, not for machines. My deep belief in that proposition is one of the things that led me to found Technologizer–and so far, it’s paying off.

How is traffic at Technologizer, you ask? I’m glad you did. It’s going really well. And a chart from Google Analytics covering September 1st through yesterday will tell the story better than I ever could:

Actually, I lied: This graph is deceptive, since it looks like the site was flatlining at almost nothing until yesterday. In truth, traffic was in the hundreds of thousands of page views a month–not bad for a site that’s still in soft-launch mode. It’s just that yesterday’s traffic–a half a million page views or so–was such a dramatic leap that it dwarfed the rest of the month into a form where it’s hard to see what was going on.

I first blogged on Technologizer on June 9th, to announce the site. But I didn’t post again until July 14th, which is when I began blogging in earnest. That was ten weeks ago. And the site looks like it will do a bit under a million page views in September–maybe more, if I’m lucky during the last few days of the month.

One story will contribute the majority of that traffic: “The 13 Greatest Error Messages of All Time.” Which is fine by me. Part of Technologizer’s recipe is to regularly publish blockbusters–stories that drive tidal waves of traffic our way. I thought this story would resonate with hundreds of thousands of people, and it did: On September 24th, it became the top story on Slashdot, and the hockey stick in the chart above was the natural result.

I launched Technologizer in part because I wanted to prove that an individual without much in the way of resources could produce content that did as well or better as that from big companies with lots of resources. “13 Greatest Error Messages,” which will likely generate a million or more page views all by itself in the weeks to come, is happy confirmation that I wasn’t completely insane.

How can you create a blockbuster story on the Web? I persist in the eccentric belief that it’s just not that hard:

1) Find the intersection of what you love and what large numbers of people might like–anything involving computer-related nostalgia is a good bet, for instance–and never write anything that doesn’t come from the heart or which you wouldn’t want to read yourself;

2) Write it in the form of a list if possible;

3) Don’t take yourself too seriously;

4) Don’t be stingy with links to other relevant sites;

5) Break it into multiple pages,but not so many that people think you’re forcing them to click, click, click;

6) Make sure that readers can chime in (”Greatest Error Messages” has generated 350 comments and 15,000 poll responses);

7) Make sure your site won’t choke on the traffic if it comes (Technologizer is hosted by Automattic , the creators of WordPress);

8) Get the ball rolling by telling social media sites like Digg and Slashdot, as well as bloggers who might be genuinely interested, that the story’s up.

That’s the strategy we pursued countless times at PC World. I simply replicated it with “13 Errors,” and once again it worked.

Next challenge for Technologizer: Do it again and again and again…sometimes more than once a month, so getting to two million page views in one month doesn’t feel like an impossible dream. I’ll keep you posted on how we’re doing.

Dear fellow journalists and other media types,

Have you ever engaged, willingly or unwillingly, in discussion of the percentage of your staff who are Web natives–also known as digital natives? It’s a handy cudgel that’s sometimes used against anyone who’s in any sense a veteran of the era in which print products dominated our business. You’re either a Web native, or you’re not.

And if you spent years committing acts of print journalism? And were pretty successful at it? And admit to loving the print medium to this day? Then you aren’t a Web native, my friend, and you are therefore suspect.

Or so the theory goes. In fact, there’s no particular background that gives you bragging rights to digital skills. I know people with thirty years of print experience who are superb at online. I also know people who arent yet thirty and who have only worked for Web publications whose skills are shaky. But the folks I know who like to talk about Web natives would never use such a phrase for that first sort of journalist, and are likely to assume that the latter sort are natives without bothering to seek evidence.

(Side note: I first read a computer magazine in 1978–and first went online, at a blazing 300 bits a second, in 1978. I’m not sure what that makes me, but I hope that sixty years of combined experience in this world earns me some street cred.)

Note also that the world is full of voracious consumers of Web content who have no particular ability to create or wrangle content that anybody will want to read.

Let’s not forget that the Web medium is so young that neatly everyone who’s old enough to earn a paycheck learned to consume media in the print era. We’re all immigrants here. And it’s entirely possible to speak both Web and print fluently. In fact, if you’re smart enough to question everything you think you know, there’s no better background for the Web than print.

And questioning everything you know forever is the only way to succeed online, since the stuff you thought you learned about the Web in 2007 is nearly as likely to be obsolete as the stuff you learned about magazines in 1997. In same cases more so, since there are such things as eternal verities, and the Web runs on fads, trends, and temporary wisdom.

I don’t mean to discount the importance of online chops–far, far, far, far from it. Any media enterprise that doesn’t have people who love the Web medium and who spend as much time as possible luxuriating in it is destined for failure. Period. Divvying up a staff into natives and non-natives, though, is a counter-productive exercise that tells you absolutely nothing about who you want on your team.

Relevant related point: The real online superstars I know never talk about the notion of digital natives.

Oh, and I lied. There are such people as Web natives. It’s just that the very oldest are around sixteen or so. When they enter the workforce, they’ll do some amazing things. But if you’re old enough to vote, you’re an immigrant to the Web, not a native…