SEO, Social Media And Travel Blogs, Pick Two

Orlan­do Mergal

This morn­ing I con­duct­ed an exper­i­ment. It was some­thing that I should’ve real­ized for years. And yet, for some strange rea­son it elud­ed me. SEO on Social Media doesn’t work! Duhhhhhhh!

I’ve been at this gig since 1990, so I’m not exact­ly a spring chick­en when it comes to the web, or all things tech­nol­o­gy for that mat­ter. In fact, I pub­lished a pod­cast for four­teen years (1990–2023) titled “Hablan­do De Tec­nología con Orlan­do Mer­gal”, that’s “Talk­ing Tech with Orlan­do Mer­gal”. So I should know a thing or two about pub­lish­ing con­tent that ranks on the Internet.

But here’s the thing, for some rea­son I nev­er real­ized that the dev­il­ish minds that cooked up social media didn’t care a hoot about what peo­ple pub­lish on their plat­forms. Those users were just a means to an end. The only prac­ti­cal use for user gen­er­at­ed con­tent was to attract eye­balls. And, of course, the only prac­ti­cal use for those eye­balls was to bom­bard them with ads.

My experiment on Facebook

VidIQ badge con­grat­u­lat­ing our YouTube chan­nel puertoricobygps.tv for reach­ing the 2,000th sub­scriber mark.
(click on image to see it larger)

So this morn­ing I con­duct­ed an exper­i­ment. I cre­at­ed a piece of con­tent that was so SEO opti­mized that it made me feel guilty. Of course, it wasn’t any­thing long, because most peo­ple today have the atten­tion span of a gnat. It was just an image announc­ing that our YouTube chan­nel www.puertoricobygps.tv had just reached its 2,000th subscriber.

The image came from VidIQ, a rep­utable source ful­ly vet­ted by YouTube. I also wrote a 560 char­ac­ter, key­word-heavy piece of copy to go with my image for good mea­sure. So what hap­pened? Well, I made sev­er­al discoveries.

As always, I com­pressed my image using Tiny PNG. After all, we all know that Social Media, and the Inter­net in gen­er­al, doesn’t like heavy images, right? But did you know that com­press­ing your images with Tiny PNG also strips them of all their meta­da­ta? That’s right! All those key­words that you painstak­ing­ly added and the well-craft­ed descrip­tion, pep­pered with the best of those key­words, all go to hell! Gone. Finite. Kaput.

Armed with this dis­cov­ery I decid­ed to add the key­words and descrip­tion after com­press­ing my image. That would assure that they reached their ulti­mate des­ti­na­tion, right? Wrong! More on that in a minute.

There was one piece miss­ing in the total opti­miza­tion of my image. It was the title of the image itself. Now here are a few trade secrets. Puer­to Rico By GPS is the name of my trav­el blog. The name, of course, serves a dou­ble pur­pose. One one hand it total­ly describes the pur­pose of our site. We serve peo­ple who explore Puer­to Rico on their own guid­ed by GPS. But sec­ond, and more impor­tant, it starts with the words Puer­to Rico, which is one of our main keywords.

Well, I decid­ed to title my image: “puerto-rico-by-gps-obtains-VidIQ-2000-subscriber-certificate.png” Sounds descrip­tive enough, right?

Then came the moment of truth. I uploaded my image and copy to sev­er­al groups on Face­book. Now, we all know that Facebook’s algo­rithm doesn’t like links, so the fact that I had one at the end of my copy lead­ing back to our blog didn’t help any. But I already knew that and was will­ing to con­tend with that fact in exchange for what­ev­er mea­ger expo­sure I could get.

My preliminary results

This is the image as I opti­mi­ized it.
(click on image to see it larger)

This is the image as I down­loaded it from Facebook
(click on image to see it larger)

Then I thought, what hap­pens to an image after you upload it to social media, in this case to Face­book? Well, l decid­ed to find out. How? By drag­ging the image on Face­book back to my desk­top and com­par­ing it with the original.

For starters the name was changed. No longer did it have the SEO friend­ly name: ““puerto-rico-by-gps-obtains-VidIQ-2000-subscriber-certificate.png”. Now the image name was: “456513592_10232598619005514_6552834934714286505_n.jpg” Now who the hell was going to enter that name into their search bar?

But there was more! Or less, I should say. All of my pre­cious meta­da­ta was gone too. No key­words, no descrip­tion, noth­ing! In a nut­shell, my image had been turned into a use­less piece of shit. Use­less for me, that is, because it cer­tain­ly still served Face­book’s pur­pose of attract­ing eye­balls to their ads.

There­fore, my image was use­less and my copy would be most­ly ignore. Could any­thing else go wrong? Of course it could! After all, we’re talk­ing about Face­book. Some over-achiev­ing group admin­is­tra­tor could con­sid­er my effort SPAM and delete it alto­geth­er. And a few actu­al­ly did. So there was that.

So, to answer the rid­dle that gave way to the title of this arti­cle, it’s SEO and Trav­el Blogs. Social media no longer works.

An experiment in progress

If I got these results on Face­book, wouldn’t it be log­i­cal to expect sim­i­lar results every­where else? Well, that’s what I’m going to find out. This isn’t to say that I have a pres­ence on all of the social media out there, or even on most of it. But I do have accounts at the main out­lets: Face­book, LinkedIn, X, Red­dit, Pin­ter­est and YouTube. So I’ll con­duct my lit­tle exper­i­ment at each of those and let you know in Part Two of this post.

Need­less to say, I sus­pect that it will be most­ly the same wher­ev­er I stick my inquis­i­tive lit­tle nose.

SEO and Travel Blogs, Why Do They Work?

The answer is sim­ple. You call the shots. You still have to con­tend with Google and the oth­er search engines scrap­ing your con­tent and plac­ing it at the SERP (search engine result page) lev­el for all to read. But, at least you can engi­neer your con­tent in ways that will make it hard­er to scrape and gar­ner a trick­le of traf­fic with­out pay­ing for it.

And how do you do that? By telling sto­ries. After all, what do you do when you come back from a trip… any trip? You tell every­one around you. You tell your fam­i­ly, friends, cowork­ers, and any­one who will lis­ten about your adventures.

In yes­ter­year you used to show them your albums. Remem­ber those? Remem­ber what it was like to go through hun­dreds of pho­tos of places you nev­er vis­it­ed and often knew noth­ing about?

Now we show our trav­el adven­tures on our smartphone
(click on image to see it larger)

Well, we still do it. Only that now we hand out our smartphone.

We’re all eager to share our expe­ri­ences. And, if done right, we can get oth­er peo­ple to enjoy them too. That’s what a good trav­el blog does. And you do it through sto­ry telling.

That’s also what makes it hard­er to scrape.

You see, search engines are designed to answer ques­tions. In the past they would index the Inter­net and point you to the cor­rect web­site. Now they scrape the web and present YOUR CONTENT as their own. If you ask me that’s a form of pla­gia­rism. But, the jury’s still out on that one.

So where’s the chink in the monster’s armor? Objec­tiv­i­ty! You ask a search engine “A” and it scrapes up the answer to “A”. All search engines are objec­tive. It’s much hard­er to scrape a sto­ry. Why. Because a sto­ry is often told between the lines. It’s objec­tiv­i­ty wrapped up in sub­jec­tiv­i­ty. Well writ­ten sto­ries are pep­pered with all sorts of nuances that aren’t replic­a­ble out­side the con­text of the sto­ry itself.

Good Travel blogs are personality driven

Many of my read­ers say that I write like I speak and I speak like I write. That’s because many of them also watch my videos. And I do. I talk about my expe­ri­ence. Good and bad. Many offi­cials at the cities that we vis­it hate that. But my read­ers love it. Well, most of them… Because they get to expe­ri­ence those places raw and unadorned.

If they like what they read, hear and see they put them on their list of places to vis­it. And if they don’t, they scratch them off. Simple!!!

Why this article?

So why write this arti­cle? Why give my com­pe­ti­tion my hard-earned knowl­edge? Well, maybe because it had been a long time since I wrote any­thing about tech­nol­o­gy. Maybe it’s because I know that sto­ry­telling is hard and most peo­ple will take the easy route of pro­duc­ing fact-dri­ven con­tent that the search engines will gob­ble up. Maybe it’s because Puer­to Rico just got hit by trop­i­cal storm Ernesto and most of the places that I had planned to vis­it aren’t in the best of shape.

Maybe it’s all of the above com­bined, or none of it alto­geth­er. Maybe I just felt like writ­ing and had to get these ideas out of my head and onto “dig­i­tal paper”.

What­ev­er it is, here it is. I know that many of the peo­ple that fol­low me are also con­tent pro­duc­ers. I mean, who isn’t these days? So let’s start a con­ver­sa­tion. What do you think about these things. Do you still find social media ben­e­fi­cial? Do you actu­al­ly believe that any­body actu­al­ly sees what you post? Am I total­ly mis­guid­ed? If you think so, let me have it!!!

Show me your facts. Let’s go through the evi­dence togeth­er. Maybe we’ll all learn some­thing along the way.

Have a great day and an even bet­ter weekend!

©2024,Orlando Mer­gal, MA
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Bilin­gual Con­tent Cre­ator, Blog­ger, Podcaster,
Author, Pho­tog­ra­ph­er and New Media Expert
Tel. 787–750-0000, Mobile 787–306-1590