No, Edison didn’t invent search engine optimization.
But he did excel at tinkering around until he found what worked, and that is what you have to do for SEO.
So, 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.
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Why SEO is important
You may pour money into all kinds of marketing campaigns, but you still can’t afford to neglect your performance on search. Ignoring it can cost you a lot of traffic.
In fact, BrightEdge found that the share of traffic from organic search has grown to 53.3% of traffic. That makes up a much larger share than organic social media and paid search combined.
It’s not just about the numbers for the sake of the machine but to be able to reach your readers effectively. As Neil Patel explains, it all comes down to your audience:
Why do you want a good sitemap? So, people can more easily find and access your content. Why do you want an optimized robots.txt? So, search engines can better crawl your site, and so readers can see the content. Why do you want the right tags in the right places? So, your content can get stellar indexing, accurate search results, and more readers of your content.
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.
The biggest mistake people make about SEO
The biggest mistake people make about SEO is thinking of it as a formula that can easily be applied to any site to boost rankings. But 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 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 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 a long time blogger, I’ve written about a variety of topics that interest me without any thought of popularity or monetization. As Google hosts these blogs, it provides me with Google Analytics that gives insight into SEO.
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 in referencing famous people that drive some queries that bring people to my blog, which is one point of insight derived.
Google doesn’t just provide me with the statistics here, it even offers to let me know what brings people to a post. So, let’s stick with Edison.
To begin with, my post ended up optimized for this query: “how many times did Edison try to invent the light bulb” because it comes up first, ahead of the Quora question and posts put out by the likes of Live Science and Smithsonian.
However, if I switch my query to “Did Edison invent the light bulb,” then the blog doesn’t even come up in the first page of results. Google knows that I’m the author of the blog that addresses the question in one way and so offers me this:
Clicking that brings me to information on my blog’s https://search.google.com. This shows me which queries deliver impressions and which deliver clicks:
Google also allows you to check on searches done for news, images, videos, as well as the web and to compare the results for any two. My comparison for web and images appears here:
This kind of insight can be helpful in showing you what your audience is responding to more. You can opt for using more images and video or less, depending on your own results.
Back to Edison
I wrote the blog on Edison back in 2015 because after visiting his lab and home, I was curious about the famous account of thousands of attempts to get the light bulb right.
I found the information in a Rutges newsletter: that referenced a letter to Edison from 1884 in which “Francis Upton noted that the lamp factory had conducted 2,774 experiments.”
This is the kind of persistence one has to apply to SEO in working through the perfect balance of appealing to your readers and to the search engine algorithms. You have to keep tweaking the content to find out what attracts the most readers, motivates links, and wins a high rank among the results for search.
Another thing to remember is this: the light bulb’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 light bulb until Edison’s patent, including the work of Lewis Howard Latimer, who was obliquely referenced by Joe Biden in the summer.
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 a constantly evolving journey of discovery.
And so we should bear in mind what Edison’s friend Walter S. Mallory recalled about their exchange on the work on developing a battery:
“Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven’t been able to get any results?’ Edison turned on me like a flash, and with a smile replied: ‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!”