Yes, blogging helps you get found

A couple of days ago I wrote a post called Is Blogging Dead? My answer is no, emphatically, blogging is not dead. My chief reason for believing this is that blogging helps you get found.

However, sometimes you get found for the wrong reason.

In the past week alone, two women have contacted me looking for help locating discontinued Clinique eye shadows. Why? Because three (!) years ago I wrote a post about my poor experience with Clinique’s Gone but Not Forgotten program. If you read the post, you may be able to tell it is a critique. If you read my About page or any other part of this website, I think it is fairly obvious that I am not associated with Clinique in any way. Yet these women somehow think I can help them, not just to find information about Clinique’s program, but to actually find the eye shadows for them.

That post is one of the most visited on this blog and it has nothing to do with what I do. Perhaps I should delete it because it is clearly bringing the wrong kind of people to this blog. At the same time it illustrates the power of blogging and specifically, of tagging and keywords. I know people find the post by keying in “gone but not forgotten.”

The main lessons here are two:

1. Blogging, and using descriptive keywords and tags, will certainly help you get found.

2. What you blog about (and the keywords, tags, etc. you use) should help you be found for what you want to be found.

Sadly, a third lesson is that many people out there do not bother to read things closely or have poor reading comprehension.

Have you had a similar experience? And, should I take that post down?