First off, I’d like to thank reader Consolidation School Loan for giving me this idea, because it really is rather timely.

We’ve talked at length here about capturing attention, and Consolidated School Loan finally broke down and basically asked which one is the most important?

The simple answer is neither.  But when in doubt, err on the side of your readers.

See, the whole reason to appeal to search engines is to GET you readers.  If, in the beginning, the search engines aren’t happy with you you’re not likely to get very far.  But once the search engines start bringing in readers, that come back regularly, well, then there’s not much point to the search engines any more, is there?

Search engines don’t buy your merch.  Search engines don’t click ads or leave comments. All a search engine does is BRING READERS, that in turn, do all those things.

Search engines take territory, to misquote the military parlance, but readers hold it.

So if you MUST decide between the two, choose readers.  Do what you can to keep the search engines happy, because they bring more readers.  But don’t sacrifice your readers’ happiness for the search engines. What does it profit me if I have the highest-ranked blog on Google, but spend all my time screaming keywords and racial epithets?  Who’ll stick around and read THAT?

Don’t ignore the search engines.  That’s a move you make at your own peril.  But neglecting the search engines a bit in favor of your readers, a sixty-forty split, say, will not go unrewarded.

Now, I know this had a lot of you concerned.  After all, Google’s pretty much big dog these days.  if Google suddenly declared you had to kill a live chicken once a week in order to keep your page rank I’d bet a whole lot of us would be out looking for cleavers.

But for those of you who might have been concerned, linking outward really has nothing to do with your page rank.  It’s not a zero-sum game–your incoming links to other pages help their page rank, but they don’t specifically hurt yours.  Page rank is only measured by the number and quality of INCOMING links.

Though there is one caveat in the sense that, if you’re close in terms of page rank to another page, and you link to that page, you might bump that other page up sufficient to where you’ll drop.  But your number of outgoing links isn’t likely to directly affect you by much.

So link away, folks, you’re only helping others and giving you a chance to get links of your own.

It’s a question you should ask yourself–can my blog handle vlogs?

A vlog, simply put, is a Video bLOG.  And if your blog is a Wordpress blog, as many of them are these days, it’s very, VERY, easy to slip a video in there.  You might think that you don’t have the face for video, or the stage presence, or the equipment.  But if you spent a half-hour or so on YouTube, you’ll discover that that doesn’t stop a lot of people.  Even posting a video to YouTube isn’t difficult; many camcorders will come with a “one touch upload” button that automatically handles a lot of common YouTube issues.

Meanwhile, a video blog reaps at least three separate benefits you’ll love.

1. A video blog gets a whole new audience involved.  People who’d never find your blog because they’re spending all their time on YouTube might well find what you have to say exciting.

2. A video blog gets you extra credibility at Google. If you’ve got a blog with keywords and such, you’ll get ahead when you have a separate video blog with keywords PLUS the blog posting of your video with keywords.

3. A video blog gives you access to a whole new field of endeavor.  Maybe you’ve thought about collecting your blog posts into a book or even an e-book.  But with video, you could release your own DVD.  If your blog is particularly entertaining you could even try to get it to video stores or distributors.  Or it could even get you on TV proper–hey, it worked for Lonelygirl15!

So when you add these together, the end result is that it may be a smart idea to consider doing a little video blogging alongside your regular turn of blogs.

Now this was something that got me.  I was reading over at Problogger about this, and the thought of it literally chilled me to the bone.

We all know that Google has a whole lot of reasons to kill your page rank, and most of them are things you’d deserve a penalty for.  If you’ve been selling text links, for example, or anything else that might be in violation of Google’s guidelines.  But what you may not know is that, at some point, for little or no reason, Google might kill your page rank and you wouldn’t even be responsible.

As it turns out, most search engines–and this includes Google–occasionally undergo changes to their algorithms, and when this happens, you might suffer an unaccountable, and unexplainable, loss in rank.

Now, this is for the most part generally temporary.  But if you should ever find your post ranking suddenly crashing, don’t panic.  It may well come back entirely on its own after just a couple days.  So take a deep breath, grab a drink, write your posts like normal and wait a couple days.  You might be surprised by what comes back.