Last year, a bunch of copy­writ­ers who also blog — like yours truly — shot the breeze on the Nuts and Blog­bolts talk radio show.

It was an inter­est­ing and at times spir­ited discussion.

After some talk about con­tent and copy (or should I say, writ­ing con­tent ver­sus writ­ing copy), the show’s host, Mike San­sone, asked each pan­elist if we would indi­vid­u­ally respond on our blogs to this question:

“Writ­ing for the vis­i­tor is more impor­tant than writ­ing for the search engines. Can both be met with­out sac­ri­fic­ing quality?”

Ryan Healy posted his answer on the sub­ject. Good answer. I agree with him, because he makes some great points. But I also dis­agree as I think there are ways around it.

So I guess my answer is both “yes” and “no.” Here’s why.

First off, I’m not a search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) expert by any stretch. How­ever, I do know enough about SEO to know that it’s pri­mar­ily based on three major factors:

Code, links, and content.

Let’s take a look at each one…

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I’m in Austin, Texas this week to attend a wed­ding — con­grat­u­la­tions to Heather and Bran­don! — and a week­long, pri­vate sem­i­nar with my mas­ter­mind group. But while I’m here, I’ve got some good news and some bad news…

The bad news — for me, not you — is that, a week before leav­ing, I suf­fered a sacroil­iac joint injury. It was likely caused by my bad pos­ture related to my exist­ing her­ni­ated discs, which as a result is caus­ing ago­niz­ing sci­at­ica.

For the first three days, I was com­pletely immo­bile. It took me an hour just to get out of bed! Any slight move­ment would cre­ate shoot­ing pains in my lower back, par­tic­u­larly in my but­tocks, and would go down my leg with aches and a “pins and nee­dles” feeling.

It’s excru­ci­at­ing. In fact, I almost backed out of the Austin trip. But being able to regain some mobil­ity, I took a chance at the last minute. Luck­ily, the air­line pro­vided me with a wheel­chair. Cur­rently, I’m walk­ing with two canes and a back brace.

Now, the good news…

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I often get requests from peo­ple ask­ing me what plu­g­ins do I use on this blog. Or, what are my favorite plu­g­ins. Some­times, I post about them. But these lists usu­ally become stale fast, because I test new plu­g­ins and change them all the time.

So I wanted to post an update and list some of my favorite plu­g­ins. How­ever, it was cum­ber­some to pick and choose which ones I wanted to post about because there are so many. So I’ve decided to do some­thing dif­fer­ent this year.

Using a plu­gin that lists all the plu­g­ins in use on a par­tic­u­lar blog (I’ll share that one with you in a moment), I man­aged to print a list of all my plu­g­ins in a sin­gle post.

How­ever, the descrip­tions you will read are those of the plu­gin authors. Some of them are poor and insuf­fi­cient. Oth­ers don’t explain how I use them specif­i­cally on this blog.

So I’ve also added a mini-​​description with addi­tional com­ments to each plu­gin to explain why, how, or where I’ve used it on this blog. I sin­cerely hope this list is use­ful to you. If it is, con­sider it a Christ­mas gift from me.

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I love read­ers’ ques­tions. And some­times, the same ques­tions keep com­ing up that I decide on post­ing a blan­ket answer on this blog to cover them.

I do this as a way to cre­ate con­tent for this blog, help my read­ers find the answers they’re look­ing for, and save me time from not hav­ing to answer the same ques­tions over and over again.

Prob­lem is, many peo­ple never find the blog post that answers their ques­tion, par­tic­u­larly if it’s old and sit­ting deep in the archives. And many peo­ple don’t take the time to search for it, because it’s work and it’s sim­ply eas­ier to con­tact my staff for the answer.

I thought about cre­at­ing a fre­quently asked ques­tions (FAQ) page. But I wanted a brain-​​dead easy solu­tion to be able to do this in a snap (much like post­ing to this blog), and offer more to my readers.

But also, I wanted one that would opti­mize my page for the search engines (where spe­cific key­words are included in the titles and ques­tions), and be easy enough for me to sim­ply answer ques­tions as I go along.

Finally, I found one…

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A cou­ple of notes. First off, my per­sonal coach­ing pro­gram has room for three more stu­dents. As a mem­ber, you can ask me unlim­ited ques­tions, one ques­tion at a time, which I will answer. This is a great oppor­tu­nity to be men­tored by me, personally.

Sec­ond, one of my stu­dents in my per­sonal coach­ing pro­gram, asked: “Michel, I’m start­ing a blog using Word­Press. Do you have any gen­eral tips on things like lay­out, plu­g­ins, design, etc?”

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John Chow recently posted a call to mon­ey­mak­ing British-​​Columbia blog­gers for a news­pa­per inter­view in his province. (Too bad it’s not about Cana­dian blog­gers, since I’m in Ottawa, Ontario, and I would have loved the extra publicity).

Nev­er­the­less, this is an inter­est­ing topic I wanted to cover in this blog because a lot of peo­ple are ask­ing about it. In fact, we dis­cussed it on a call with Clay­ton Make­peace, enti­tled “Blog­ging For Dol­lars.” Peo­ple raved so much about the call that they’ve begged Clay­ton for a sec­ond one. (And yes, by pop­u­lar demand, we’re doing one in March, so stay tuned!)

But let me share, how­ever, some of the things we dis­cussed on the call — along with a few tid­bits on how you can make money with a blog.

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The “Google Slap.” You’ve heard of it. You were prob­a­bly affected by it. Essen­tially, Google, the world’s largest search engine, recently penal­ized a whole bunch of sites because they, too, judged them to be of poor quality.

Either they dimin­ished their pager­anks into obliv­ion, or they increased their AdWords costs by jack­ing up the prices if the cam­paigns led to poor con­tent. (And as you prob­a­bly know, this has dri­ven a lot of mar­keters out of business.)

But keep in mind, Google didn’t make this change by pulling it out of thin air or to dic­ta­to­ri­ally decide what’s good for the Inter­net. They’re sim­ply fol­low­ing what peo­ple want and giv­ing it to them.

(In fact, when Google makes such major changes, let it be a good indi­ca­tor of what’s going on in the marketplace.)

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