Some things are well known. We all know keyword density is important so that Google’s crawler knows what your site is about. Titles are important. Text needs to be discoverable.

This is another reason that I like writing things at Associated Content – and one reason it is in some ways better than a blog.

How Do You Know What Works?

Trial and error.

Sure, you can read about keyword density and search engine optimization all day. You’ll never know if it works until you try it. And you’ll never know it was your optimization that worked until compare a handful of articles on the same topic with different styles.

Think of it as an experiment of sorts. By writing about a single topic with three or four different angles, you can see what works and what doesn’t. You might pick up some trailing phrases that you didn’t think of just by writing the same piece with a slightly different angle and some alternate word choices.

Do Your Readers Want to Read Five Articles About the Same Thing?

Probably not. If you’re trying to build a regular readership for your blog, you don’t want to come out with five slightly different articles about how NCAA football needs a playoff.

Ahh, but are you worried about subscribers at Associated Content? Well, some people are. I’m not. I see it as a playground to write things that are destined just for the search engine minefield.  My writings at AC vary across so many topics that it doesn’t really make sense for people to subscribe to it.

That makes it the perfect place to test out writing techniques. For example, today I wrote up two pieces about Fallout 3 – How Do I Finish Chapter 6 of Fallout 3 Without Killing Everyone and How to Complete Chapter 6 “Tranquility Lane” Without Losing Karma.

Each article says substantively the same thing – it tells the reader how to complete the quest in a certain way. They do so in different ways, though, from the title right down to the conclusion.

Oh, and Get Your Backlinks While You’re At It

Like I’ve written before, Associated Content is also a great place to create some links back to your own content on your blog.

In this case, I’m writing a lengthier, illustrated walkthrough on Chapter 6 in Fallout 3 on this site. The Associated Content articles tackle the same topic in a more concise way, and they include a few well crafted links back to my content here. A reader that finds the AC articles could want more information and click on the links back here – earning me more traffic.

I wouldn’t say that Associated Content is better than a blog or that it has more earning potential in the long run. It is, however, a good supplement to a blog – allowing you to hone your SEO practices and improve your site at the same time.

Why don’t you go flex your SEO muscles at Associated Content? It’s a great place to test out all those theories without boring your regular readers.

Are blogrolls a good idea? Do they instill confidence in your readers, or do they just bleed search engine juice from your site?

The Positives: An Informed Author is a Trusted Author

There certainly is something to be said for a blogroll of sorts. When a new user finds your site, he may want to poke around and see who you are.

One place to look is the About page. This should give the reader some information. Another place to look is the blog roll. If you’re supposed to be an authority on the topic, who else do you read?

You can’t possibly keep up with the times if you work in a vacuum, so it’s of interest to the reader how you keep up with things.

A blogroll can also be useful for someone looking for more information.

For example, I’m always looking for more education blogs to follow. I’ve found a ton of tech-related blogs (duh), but very few that are written by Social Studies teachers. Whenever I stumble on a new education blog, I browse through the blogroll looking for something written by a Socials Studies teacher.

The Negatives: Sitewide Links Are Bad for SEO

There are definitely some downsides to blogrolls, though. Some people might not care so much, but if you worry about SEO then you should be worried about that giant list of sitewide links.

You see, sitewide links are like a giant drain on your search engine juice. Each page contains a certain amount of page rank worthiness, and each link on that page spreads the page rank love around.

Sitewide links within your site are great, because they help redistribute that link love. Since every one of your pages links back to the front page, it’ll have a higher pagerank than the individual pages in your site. Likewise, pages like category indexes – linked to by many of your individual pages – will have greater search engine visibility.

Sitewide links going out of your site aren’t so good, though. Each one is a trickle of pagerank going down the drain. One or two sitewide links aren’t going to kill you – but what if you have a dozen pages in your blogroll? Consider how many pages of content you have (hundreds, thousands even?) and multiply that by the number of links in your blogroll.

Even a short list of links – six or seven – could easily work out to thousands of outbound links. Yowza.

To authors who are blogging for a smaller audience and aren’t concerned with search engine traffic, this isn’t a big deal. If you’re in the market to monetize your blog, though, that should concern you a great deal.

I also think that sidebars can easily get over-crowded. With other necessary items (recent posts, categories, archive links, ads, etc) there just isn’t a lot of real estate to give up for that a list of links.

What to Do? Compromise.

I’ve decided to go with a compromise of sorts.

For the sake of my readers, I want to have a blogroll available. I want people to know what I read, and I want to reward those sites that I read regularly with some link love.

However, I don’t want to have a dozen or so sitewide links bleeding my search engine juice. I’d like to keep some of that for myself, so people actually find the site!

Instead, I decided to create a separate blogroll page. In actuality, it’s just another post in my index, but you could consider it a static page of sorts.

On the blogroll page, I include a link to a handful of sites that I regularly read. This is likely to change over time as I change my subscriptions, but I’d say that on any given day you’ll find 6-12 sites that I read. This also gives me a chance to add a comment (a sentence or two) about each site, so the reader knows what to expect.

Then, to make sure that readers can easily find it, I put a prominent link to the blogroll page in my header. Along with the About page, I think this provides some good information about me and my site without hurting my search engine placement.

What do you do think? Are you concerned about all those outbound links, or do you just include a blogroll anyway?

Without thinking, I headed over to Google and typed in “Stock Exchange.”  As soon as I hit Submit, I thought, “That ain’t gonna work!  I don’t want the real stock exchange!”

And then I saw the number one result: stock.xchng.  Wow.

Somebody has some good SEO.  They beat out the NYSE, NASDAQ, the Wikipedia entry on the stock exchange, and plenty of other articles that would be more meaningful to most people that searched for “Stock Exchange.”

Or, maybe Google is inside my head and it knows what I want.  Creepy.