Yesterday, I gave a few ideas about how to make your blog work, but there are still a few things that you have to avoid in order to realize any success. There are many benefits to publishing a business blog and improved search engine visibility is one of the most profitable. It’s common advice to start a blog and have the fresh content attract links, improving your search results. Such tactical advice can be very effective, if you know how to go about using it.
Unfortunately, the advice gets filtered and distorted, just like what happens in the game “telephone” that kids play. Pretty soon one or more blogs are implemented for the sole purpose and expectation of improving search engine visibility and nothing else. At least nothing else that’s accountable. Blogs that are started solely for SEO objectives will inevitably fail.
Here are a few reasons why:
1. Lack of planning and oversight – After the new car smell of starting a blog wears off, those tasked with writing content often get distracted by their other responsibilities. Bit by bit, posts look less and less like keyword optimized web pages and sink back to the familiar writing styles common to public relations and corporate marketing. Gone are the keywords that consumers are searching on. Gone is the personality. Gone is the traffic that used to come from search engines.
Do not let your SEO efforts get sloppy. They can get sloppy without ongoing oversight by an outside SEO consultant or an editor. Sloppiness can turn into “keyword stuffing” that will drive traffic away.
2. No passion for the topic – There are more than 100 million blogs, and 90 percent of them do not have fresh content on a regular basis. It takes commitment, well-thought out ideas and an interest in your topic to be able to blog on an ongoing basis. If the blogger is not personally interested in a topic, he will encounter writer’s block quickly. Readers will lose interest in shallow content.
3. SEO as we’ve known it is a dying breed – The loophole-based SEO tactics of yesterday that brought incremental ranking advantages are being efficiently dealt with by search engines, as are paid links. SEO will always have value of course, because as long as content can be searched, it can be optimized.
When it comes to blogs, consumer information discovery trends are involving social networks and social media at an increasing rate. Recommendations are competing with search. Social media traffic is in the top 5 referring sources of viewers. Blogs as social media sources will become increasingly important for many business efforts in the coming years..
Have you started a blog only to lose interest or stop contributing to it? What was your reason? What would you do differently?
