SEO Tricks and Traps

This morning I stumbled on this post, which gives some advice on optimizing your blog for search engines. I have a mostly negative attitude toward the entire SEO field, and particularly with SEO as it relates to blogs. You want your blog to be noticed by the engines? Write regularly about topics that you are interested in and know something about. Over time, you'll build an audience, which will generate back links - and page rank. To be blunt, SEO tricks are an attempt to get out of doing the hard work of writing.

Anyway, here's the trick being advocated today:

Why would you ever want to make a post sticky? Because it’s an easy way to improve the keyword prominence on a category page or tag page. If you’re not familiar with the concept of keyword prominence, it’s simply this: the higher up on the page your targeted keyword is, the better you’ll rank. So, having keyword-rich intro copy that consistently appears at the top of a category page or a tag page will give you good keyword prominence and help you maintain a stable keyword theme for the page even when old posts fall off the page and new posts appear.

Well, that only works if people visit that category page and link to it. Now, I can see some value in making a post sticky - I've never done it (heck, I haven't added support in my blog server, although it would be pretty easy to do so). The problem, as I see it, is that if you are trying to attract people (and engines) to a specific category, then that's something you write about regularly. Do you really want the new content to be stuffed beneath an older post? Most people make decisions about whether to read a page in seconds (some people say less). If I spot "old news" at the top of a page, I don't bother scrolling down - my assumption is that everything under the old post is even older.

I rather think that this strategy will end up having as many negatives as positives, because it works against people's expectations about content presentation on a blog.