Search Engine Tigers

Sometimes you, and by you I mean I, have an idea for the perfect post. Hopefully you’re near a computer, a pad and pen, or your blackberry, and you can jot it down.

Eagerly you rush to the computer, and start typing. Waiting for the moment that Neil Gaiman describes thusly

..that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it’s about and why you’re doing it… and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising… and it’s magic and wonderful and strange.

Then it happens, either the post starts to head in a different direction, and you’re not happy with the way it’s gone, your beautiful six year old daughter runs in and distracts you, you get half way through and don’t think that what you’re saying is worthwhile, or you get done and before you post it you go to your feed reader and someone else has covered the same topic in a much better way.

In this spirit, I thought I’d go through 4 posts that stare back at me from their draft status every time I open up wordpress, and say why they didn’t make it.

Why SEO is like a game of pool

Seemed like a great concept, well at least when I was in the pool hall wasting time before a hair cut. You have to play your shot, get the ball in the hole, but that’s not enough, you also have to position yourself for the next shot. Your SEO plan should always be thinking one step beyond where you are now, getting ready for the next ’shot’. After about a paragraph the analogy started to wear too thin, so it went over to the draft pile.

Ethics and Anonymity

This post was about how anonymity really doesn’t exist on the web, and people who believe that it does, will eventually get found out. This was triggered by the scandal involving the Whole Foods CEO who was posting anonymously on a finance site about a competitor. I put this post aside and other people did a much better job of covering it. A few weeks later though, I did return to this topic and completely rewrote it over on the RBDRodeo blog.

How Important is your Title Tag?

This is a post that could go live any time, all I need to do is go back to it and finish it / tidy it up. I think I have enough in there to differentiate it from other posts on the same topic.

Running with Analytics

The post was written and scheduled to go up a week ago. It talked about how preparing for running a marathon (less than 2 weeks until I attempt my first) you should listen to your body and determine when you can push yourself to go to the next stage, and when you should make corrections to your running based on feedback from your body (my poor knees). Obviously I then tied this into analytics, and how you should use them to know when to modify your site, and when to push it to the next level. Then, the day before the post was scheduled to go live… the Chicago marathon debacle happened. With one person dead and over 300 hospitalized, I figured it wouldn’t be a good idea for that post to go live, so instead I rewrote it and put a post on Continual Measurement with Analytics on RBDRodeo.

So there you have it, 4 posts that have been sitting there, begging with me to do something with them, and now that I have I can put 3 of them out of their misery, and let the 4th one sit there in the knowledge that I’ll return to it at some point.

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