I’m awed by the simplicity of this page: Ringworm Pictures

What’s so awesome about it? It’s a 2-page blog hosted for free, with two paragraphs of text and a half-dozen pictures that seem to have been sourced from Google Images… and an AdSense ad unit. The site gets a fair amount of traffic from a link in a Wikipedia article. (Until someone notices and removes it, probably.)

So while this specific site is not adding a lot of value to the global conversation about ringworm, it’s a wonderful example of a single-purpose blog: it answers a single question, and for the people asking that question, it answers the question pretty well.

Our interests are not limited to a little residual AdSense income, though, so for us the question now becomes: how can we apply this example to a legitimate SEO effort?

In short, let’s create some blogs.

Make the content original, real and useful. Answer the important question. Provide good links to your destination site. Update the blog periodically so the content is fresh and accurate.

Here’s a good example, answering the question How can I send an ecard?

It must be said that blogs with no inbound links tend not to rank very well in search engine results, so any single such blog probably won’t be very effective. But a suite of related, interlinked, single-purpose blogs could be pretty interesting…