My policy on SEO and blogs has always been: Spell things right and use correct terminology / brand names, but don’t push it. Until now I’ve not had any back up on my hands-off policy of Blogging and SEO.

I can tell you that my other blog gets a lot of on-target and WAY FREAKING OFF target traffic from search engines. But blogs are about frequency and diversity of content, so be yourself and use the right voice and you should be as successful as the Patagonia blog, The Cleanest Line. I asked my friend Localcrew what their SEO policy was and this is what he said:

SEO: answer is nope, for the reason you said. Our blog works as it does precisely because we don’t try to make it work like so many think we intentionally do. That might not make a lot of sense, another way to say that is: we get free reign to do what we want with it. The only direction is to “stay true to the voice of Patagonia.”

I shudder when I see those business articles that talk about all the different ways to “build master-planned customer communities.” Actually, that’s not right. More like: those things make me queasy. The folks who buy that stuff are missing the point about what makes blogs what they are. They want to control the beautiful chaos that gave rise to those communities in the first place. Success lies not in “embracing” chaos, but in bearing enthralled witness to it . . . and occasionally participating ;-)

-M