It seems the debate is still going on and will probably keep happening about focusing on building a strong community with or without search engine optimization.

I had a brief conversation with Nick awhile back and said that I feel I should not worry about SEO because no one really searches for college life tips or improving their college experience on Google or any other search engines. That being said, I do think he brings up a great point that everyone can utilize SEO in an effective way.

But, at the same time I believe that if you want to build a very strong and stable community you need to not have SEO be apart of it.

Why? There are so many ways of building a strong community that are much more effective and you are just going to cut yourself short by working hard on making your site or blog the best in SEO. Additionally there comes a time and place for everything, right? When building a strong community you need to focus on connecting with people, have strong and effective conversations, and really building your personal brand.

After reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s book, Crush It!, I now know how important it is to build your personal brand, because with no personal brand you don’t have an effective community to push anything that you do along for success.

4 Ways to Build a Strong Community Without SEO

Commenting on Blogs

This is probably one of the most tedious forms of building your community, but it is also very effective.

If you are willing to put in the time, sweat, and energy and really dominate all the blogs that are in or related to your niche or personal brand.   What happens when making a comment is you’re connecting with the person behind that blog and their community and you strive to not really gain attention (no spam) but just offer your two-cents on what is being discussed. You do this and the person behind the blog and their community will take a visit to your blog.

But, this ultimately fails when you either make a poor comment (see the next four links to read how you can prevent this) or you are not transparent with what you are saying on their blog in either your personal branding or your own community.

9 Ways to Increase Comments on Your Blog

Your Guide to Comments that Get Noticed

7 Tips to Sharing Highly Effective Comments

Utilizing USTREAM.tv

Want to make a huge online presence? Heard of Jordan Cooper from Not a Pro Blog? He is making a huge online presence along with Ashton Kutcher and Gary Vaynerchuk by streaming live video of themselves.

Can anyone do this? Yes! What these guys are doing and what you can do is utilize the power of live creative, exciting, or interseting video to create viewers and many conversations.  Sparking this conversations and gaining viewers is only going to help you build a strong community and online presence.

Not good at video? Start practicing and you might find personal enjoyment out of it.  Think of this as being an uplifting way to build and connect with your community.

Participating in Forums

When I think of forums I think of geeky gamers going online and talking about their latest journey in Warcraft.  To this day they have evolved and their purpose is to help the prospective community as customer service support.

Forums are a good way of keeping the community you have because they feel important being part of it, but when reaching out they are underutilized.  More forums are forming and they are attracting many of us because they hold great value.

They are a big playground for us to just talk and respond to whatever is being talked about. Nothing you want to respond to, you can start your own topic.  What a perfect opportunity to present yourself and attract followers for your working community back at your site.

Search.Twitter.com

Lastly, welcome to the most underutilized and unproductive way of connecting with others in your niche or related to your niche. I call it search.twitter.com. Just recently I have devoted a good amount of time to this “tool” in engaging with other college students.

Summary

All of these ways are great in building an effective and strong community for your blog, but you need to keep a few things in mind.

You need to more than just one of these ways, these ways and some others all can guarantee a healthy community without worrying about SEO to attract a “community”, and if you have no transparent or noticeable brand with a community to back you up you will not have a strong online presence.

I know SEO is very important in attracting viewers, but in terms of building and maintaining a strong community it takes so much time and effort. Instead, let’s put that time and effort into not only building a community but building our online presence and SEO cannot do that.

Group Reflection

Of course this is a debate, but do you agree or disagree with me saying that we can build a much more effective community without worrying about SEO?

The point of this post is to get our mindsets on doing both of building a community and creating an online presence. What are ways you are building your community and your online presence without SEO?

Think about all the links you have on the web.  Most if not all of these links are ones consisting of your specific articles.

Don’t spend too much time designing your homepage if your article page is lacking the quality your homepage has currently.  Think about what is all on your homepage that might be lacking on your article page.

Once you have attracted an audience they will come back to the homepage, which is where you would like them to be comfortable and know they are at your home.  So, you need to capture this same feeling from any non-current visitor or reader. Do this through your article page, because this is the first page they will most likely see.

Time to make sure your article page is your advertisement.

Standout Truthful Content

First and foremost, does your content easily stand out and the main focus?

You don’t want any visitors to be wondering where the content is that they chose to click on. Additionally, you don’t want readers to be irrelevant to what you initially ‘advertised’ the content to be.

No tricks should be played to grasp peoples attention unless that is your site or blog’s true purpose.  Besides knowing that you need to correctly ‘advertise’ your content, you need to think about the length and overall layout of the actual content.

If you have an article that is around 300 words you are probably not fully utilizing the scrolling power that might draw attention to your sidebar(s).

Remember that your sidebars are where most ‘advertising’ of your site will be done.

So there is not point in having short content that will not capture all the ‘goodies’ on the sidebar. On the other hand if you do not have a immense sidebar, which I recommend to keep your sidebar busyness at a minimum, there’s no need to write 600 word articles that just go far past your sidebar.

Noticeable Purpose or Mission

Of course throughout your content we need to have our voice and/or mission be present.  If we don’t have this, then we first need to rework our writing.

Whenever there are visitors, we want them to know what we are about immediately and really should not have to visit the about page.  Think of all the clues a visitor would gain from seeing your homepage without seeing the about page.  Would these same things be transparent in your article pages?

If there is no noticeable purpose or mission that can be easily acknowledged from our article pages, then these visitors will only be a one-time visitor.

We need to make sure we are taking into consideration our purpose through design.

Featured Areas

Specifically, these featured areas or special features are the specific areas along your sidebar(s).  When looking at Site Sketch 101, you will notice that the featured areas are:

Search bar, Nick’s upcoming book “Blogging to the Third Power” sign up form, Recently popular articles, Latest Tweets

Now if you were to go to the homepage of this site take a look at what is below the content and along the sidebar.

On the sidebar there is the following:

Search bar, Nick’s upcoming book “Blogging to the Third Power” sign up form, Latest Tweets, Blogging Authorities

Then, directly below the most recent article is the following:

Popular Articles, Articles for Beginners, Nick’s Favorites, Weekly Video, Recent Posts

Of course there is more on the homepage, but Nick has obviously found the current featured areas on the sidebar for each article page to be the most important for his blog.  Additionally, the order of these featured areas are very important and you should think about what is most crucial to the image of your site.

Bringing It All Together

Your site or blog design all determines the effectiveness of any visitor’s experience.  We want this effectiveness to be high just like when making advertisements.  If you make an advertisement that is lacking any core element that you are striving to get across it will not be effective.

We always hear that content is king.  But, content is not king when your blog is lacking transparent design. Making this transparency will be easier when thinking of your article pages has advertisement for visitors.

Group Reflection

What goes through your mind when brought to an article page besides just reading the specific content?

We can have a blog with lots of great articles, but our design supports our content. And in reaching new readers, we have to make everything that we want to be revealed to visitors as effective as possible. How are you making sure this is happening on your blog?

A few days ago, you all were presented with a collection of The 35 Most Beautiful Websites in 2010. But as we looked through these stunning sites, we were interested in more than just casually browsing through an art gallery. We’re interested in consistently learning and improving our own websites and blogs.

The creators of those websites designed them with much different purposes than many bloggers. Many of us as bloggers strive to draw new visitors into our websites. We focus on clear navigation and easy usability. We want the page to load quickly and we want the written material to stand out quickly and easily.

Our mission as bloggers is to present content. It’s to build subscribers. It’s to draw users into engaging with us through comments and contact forms. It’s to convince users to visit our websites again and again to view our fresh content.

So with that in mind, let’s examine some of the powerful principles that underscore the work done by these amazing designers and focus on them in such a way as to allow us to achieve greater success in our mission.

They Break Barriers

Don’t just limit yourself to the typical blog style format. When we look to design our blog’s theme or critique it to our needs, we usually stay inside a few known barriers.

These known barriers are a well defined header that explains the overall mission of your blog, clear navigation links, and a quick eye on new content and how to stay connected with the blog.

But, do we obligate ourselves to break these barriers?

Most of us bloggers seems to act like we are trapt and that we have to stay within set barriers, because it comes from listening and reading many blogs about blogging. These blogs are all in agreement with one another, so we get worried that if we break these barriers we are doing it the wrong way.

They are all right in regards to what is popular and what the general approach should be.

Now, these websites do not take advice from these blogging tips in terms of design, because they have no need to. We need to take advice from both these websites and blogs about blogging and allow ourselves to push creativity and orginality.

They Deliver Powerful First Impressions

The internet is filled with users who will visit your website or blog and determine in a matter of seconds whether or not your material is worth digging into. Does the StumbleUpon crowd come to mind?

If you don’t have something amazing to catch the attention of casual browsers then you are going to be losing lots of valuable traffic back into the abyss. You don’t want to do that.

Take the time to create something that really stands out from the crowd. Make an effort to impress and show off. Make it look good.

They Tailor the Design to the Website’s Purpose

When looking at the 35 beautiful websites, don’t feel compelled to make your design look like theirs.

Their purpose is to show off their work through their design and attract new clients right off the bat. They don’t necessarily want to keep people coming back to their site everyday. It’s more of an announcement than a reoccuring keynote speech.

As bloggers, our purpose is to attract readers to keep them coming back over a long period of time. We certainly want to take elements from their design and customize them to fit our needs of keeping the audience engaged by featuring our content.

They Deliver Consistency in Their Design

A website design is composed of many different elements including sidebars, headers, icons, graphics, text fields, buttons, fonts, and more. If you visit many blogs you see that many people design these elements in a rather whimsical fashion.

Often bloggers will find sets of icons or graphics that really look nice. They’ll save them and load them onto their site even though they often don’t match the rest of their blog theme at all. Maybe it’s a set of glossy social bookmarking icons against a textured background. Perhaps a hand-sketched set of graphics against a Web 2.0 sleek-looking site.

Professional designers understand the need for consistency. Use similar textures. Coordinate your colors. Don’t use too many different fonts. Create a theme and stick with it.

Group Reflection

Those websites provide some pretty amazing ideas for us but it’s only useful for us if we can take some wisdom away by understanding their purpose and pushing our blog to the next level. Let’s use these lessons to grow in our ability to connect with people online.

So as we reflect on the work of these digital artists, let’s ask ourselves some questions to expand the way that we view our blog’s designs. Why did they organize their header the way they did? What kind of environment do the colors and textures create?