No, Edison didn’t invent search engine optimization. But he did make a habit of tinkering around until he found what worked. You have to do the same to optimize your SEO.
Are we really going to talk about Edison? Yes. The first lesson of SEO is that the title
must match the content because it is the promise you make that the content has to deliver.
You want to build an audience by giving them content that they find so good, they share it.
Clickbait always disappoints and so would only be shared by those who don’t really read
the content.
Why SEO is important
People put a lot of trust in what comes up as a result in organic search precisely because it
comes across as information they seek rather than ads people paid to have shown to them.
While it’s easier to get fast results when you pay for ads, a solid content strategy that incorporates SEO will offer a greater ROI over time.
What people get wrong about SEO
The biggest mistake people make when deciding to implement SEO is thinking of it as a formula that can easily be applied to any site to boost rankings instantly. SEO doesn’t
work like that.
You don’t just read up on some SEO tips, apply them, and expect surges of traffic overnight.
As is always the case of seeing results from content marketing, you have to allow six months to see measurable results from working through necessary tweaks
to titles, keywords, tags, etc.
Improving it involves understanding what brings people to your content, what they’re
looking for, and how they’re phrasing their searches. That can inform your strategy
for creating content that is is is both relevant to your brand and to your audience’s
concerns, so the context within your work is important.
Understanding SEO in context of your content
As someone who has blogged for fun since 2005, I’ve written about a variety of topics that
interest me without any though of popularity or monetization. Google Search Console
reports give me valuable insights into SEO by showing me not just which posts gets clicks
but which queries bring them to people's attention.
My post on Edison is far and above the most popular post on that blog, as you can see from the top five shown below. The other four have something in common with
the Edison blog; they reference famous people. Those names are key component
of some of the queries that bring people to my blog. That was one insight derived
from studying Search Console.
Lightbulb* interest persists
Google doesn’t just provide me with the statistics here; it shows me what brings people to a post with emails that offer updates on performance, as well as the queries people type in that drives them to my site.
The latest one offered this insight:
How do people find you?
Top growing queries
Compared to previous month
how many times did edison fail before inventing the lightbulb
+18 clicks (web)
how many tries did it take to invent the lightbulb
+9 clicks (web)
how many tries to invent the lightbulb
+9 clicks (web)
Top performing queries
I wrote the blog on Edison back in 2015 when my curiosity was piqued about the myth of a thousand attempts to get it right after visiting his lab and home in New Jersey. Clearly many
others share that curiosity, and it is their query that drives traffic to the blog, delivering SEO
results that far exceed what I could get on social media.
Keep your content updated
Another thing to remember is this: the lightbulb’s development certainly didn’t
end when Edison filed for a patent on the bamboo filament version. It continued
to evolve over time, and your content has to as well, to stay relevant and rank well.
Accordingly, in 2020 I added several updates to the blog. They ranged from warnings about the Edison sites having closed to visitors and offering only virtual tours to more details about the evolution of the lightbulb until Edison’s patent, including the work of Lewis Howard Latimer, who was obliquely referenced by Joe Biden in the summer.
In 2022, I added a reference to the HBO series,
The Gilded Age because the seventh episode
makes a point of bringing up Latimer in connection with Edison. The problem with that is
that show is set in 1882 when Latimer was still working for Edison's competitor. Though
he did come to work for Edison, that was in 1884. He also was working in the New York
office, primarily on patent issues -- not in the Menlo Park lab where the tinkering took
place.
Google is constantly adjusting its algorithms, so you have to constantly adjust your own
content to keep it optimized. SEO is not an ultimate destination but constantly evolving
journey of discovery.
*Note on "lightbulb" as one word. I opted for that here because it is AP style; however, writing it as two words is also correct.
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