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SEO Connectivity: Defining Community Boundaries

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 14, 2007 in SEO Theory

What do your parents, your husband or wife, your boss, you neighbors, your friends, the people you supervise, and the members of your local congregation all have in common?

You.

You are the nexus of a community of people who may be largely unaware of each other but who all have at least one thing in common: they all share some sort of bond with you.

The movie “Big Fish” (starring Ewan MacGregor and Albert Finney as dreamer Edward Bloom) is about building community. Edward Bloom looks at the people in his life in such a special way that they all become stories to him. But he meets people in different corners of the world and it is only at the end of the story, when they arrive for his funeral, that his son Will understands that Edward really did bring many people together to build a special community of friends who had never really known each other.

You are Edward Bloom. There is a community surrounding you. You build that community every day.

Your Web site can be the heart of that community. Everyone you know can link to your site and help build your visibility. But in return you can give everyone you know something to include on their Web site: content.

You can give away testimonials, tips, reviews, advice, freelance articles, special introductions, and more. You can help your community build their sites and in return earn the special status of being their hub. And the neat thing about building a community is that you are free to lay asside the silly bounds of relevance and create the community of Web content that you feel most comfortable in.

If you have ten friends with Web sites to devoted to as many different topics, you can most likely find something to say about each topic. If your friends operate forums you won’t have any problem spending time in those forums. A useful forum post can be a useful Web article. The only difference between a lengthy, thoughtful forum post and a feature article is the HTML code that surrounds the content.

The Web is about community. Community is where you build your greatest strength. Your friends and relatives will want to be your advocates. They will want to support you. Exceptions to the rule notwithstanding, if you blind yourself with rules of relevance to the possibilities that your community offers you, then you deserve to be blessed with search invisibility.

Relevance is not just about keywords on a page and keywords in link anchor text. Relevance is about the communication between people. Relevance is about the bond between strangers. You have what other people are looking for, but sometimes what you have is best placed on someone else’s site. So why help a stranger’s Web site if you can help a friend or relative’s Web site instead?

Search engines are not the only arbiters of relevance. Relevance begins with people and their priorities. Xenite.Org, a science fiction and fantasy site, is relevant to the care and comfort of injured soldiers returning from our wars overseas because Xenite.Org helps to promote a program called “Wounded Warriors”. We ask for nothing in return because those veterans have already given their all for us.

You can look at the larger community of your nation or the smaller community of your family and friends. You can look to the professional community in which you participate or the educational community with which you learn. You can reach out to other people who share your faith, your political principles, your legal needs, your health issues.

You build your relevance one relationship at a time and no search engine algorithm can determine for you or anyone else what is most relevant to your Web site. Your priorities, your fundamental principles, define who you are and what you choose to do. Your Web site falls somewhere within the boundaries of those priorities and principles.

Counter-intuitive though that may seem in the light of formulaic SEO, building community and relevance through community is at the heart of true search engine optimization because you need friends and allies in search and you need visibility. You can limit your visibility to just your own Web site or you can realize visibility’s full potential by reaching out to other Web sites.

This isn’t about finding fair and equitable exchanges. It’s about casting your bread upon the waters. It’s about putting your faith (and your unique, original content) in other people’s Web sites. It’s about being relevant to more than just a few keywords. When you achieve that level of SEO mastery, you empower yourself in ways few SEOs appreciate.

And you’ll enjoy the most success and the easiest results when you operate in fields that other SEOs avoid because of their conservative rule-based optimization. You have the advantage when you take the initiative and do something no one else is doing.