Blogs present a great way to keep your site fresh, informative and evolving as a resource. Also the interactive nature of blogs means that you can communicate with your constituency to share, gather and showcase expertise. Blogs can be enormously powerful pieces of Internet publishing - Just ask Robert Peston
Blogs, whether simple site blogging or blog outreach (the submission of blog content to third party sites), can play a critical role in any SEO strategy. Well conceived, well crafted blogs based around specific topics and delivered in natural tone with integrity can generate additional traffic, brand awareness, and especially new linking opportunities. Blog outreach when applied intelligently exchanges high quality content, perhaps an article or an exclusive audio stream for high value links. Website owners are always looking for high quality content. If you have it, flaunt it, share great content for links – it will help your optimisation no end.
At Top Page we fully appreciate the contribution of high quality, regularly written blogs as a component of SEO strategy and offer a range of strategic input, copy writing, technical development and blog submissions.
As SEO specialists we work to establish both relevance and ways by which the search engines are able to identify it. Relevance needs a contextual framework through informative, meaningful content. Content is THE critical component of the Internet and blogs serve to provide a great platform for engine searchable content.
Quality not quantity
Best keep them meaty too. Despite the rise and rise of micro blogging, largely in the form of Twitter, traditional blogs are still very worthwhile pursuing for their SEO benefits. Web guru Jakob Nielsen refers to in-depth content adding in-depth value, recommending fewer high quality articles over a higher quantity of poorly written blogs.
"A thousand monkeys writing for 1,000 hours won’t write Shakespeare but create a thousand random, low quality posting that don't give readers a comprehensive understanding of the topic, even if those readers suffer through all 1,000 blogs." He says.
Though many blogs fall short of delivering the depth and expertise that is necessary to elevate their sites above the competition and many others fall in the ghastly vanity publishing black hole, carefully considered and crafted blogs, as well as articles, should be an integral part of an overall online marketing/SEO campaign. Blogs can play an important role in gaining trust, authority, high search engine placements and traffic largely through high quality inbound links - The SEO raison d’etre.
Scannable
Consumable - Make blogs concise and scannable, format using bullet points and lists offering useful tips and advice. Use Web 2.0 video, podcasts, streams and media as well if it makes sense.
Connection
From the most intimate to the most commercial, the important thing about blogs is connection; that it’s a forum for conversation through which community evolves. Bryan Appleyard writing in the Times refers to the intimacy/exposure nexus. ‘ The way to get your blog going is to use connectivity. Link to other blogs and place comments. They’ll come back to you. Once they do, a few will stay. You will acquire regulars. You’ll get to know them. If they stay away for a while, you’ll miss them. You’ll feel, if you’re a sucker like me, somehow responsible for and to them. This is weird, I know, but then good things start to happen.’
Blog Submission
Regularly and far afield should do the trick. Largely through RSS feed and blog submissions to directories.
Submitting blogs to many of the RSS & blog directories is much simpler than submitting standard sites as there are automatic systems in place that allow submissions of updated blog versions to directories.
Dedicated blog search directories including The Technorati Blog Directory (a U.S. based blog search engine is currently tracking over 112.8 million blog copywriters), Boing Boing, Answers, Digg and Feedburner plus the major search engines are great destinations. Technorati
It’s important that clients ‘get’ what is trying to be achieved – that a well written, regularly updated blog using a natural voice can offer a more ‘human’ type of writing and create a space where professional formalities are put to one side as a ‘human side’ is revealed. Blogs enable readers get to know you and your organization intimately, the closer you are able to be to your audience the better the experience for all. Engage your audience and interact. Blogging is a conversation, speak to your readers, always keep them in mind and at the centre of everything: the topics you cover, the way you write, what choose to include and what you omit.
Good blogs?
Here’s a couple of the best blogs as chosen by Bryan Appleyard;
bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology
At the BBC’s Dot Life, abundant intelligent comment replaces the prattle that makes most geek blogs unreadable. The British perspective is also refreshing in an American-dominated blogosphere.
popjustice.com
"You shouldn’t grow out of pop music the moment you hit puberty" and "You shouldn’t grow into pop music the moment you discover irony" are among the tenets of Popjustice. Whether wowed or withering, it is compulsive reading, and its accolade as the Smash Hits for the digital age is spot-on.
Two for the road;
Edpeto.com – guy living in Beijing. Has interesting things to say on life, music and yoof culture in China.
zmag.org/zspace/noamchomsky - thought provocation by the bucket load
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