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Went Hot: August 13, 2008 - 10:51 am
Posted By: MattMcGee 328 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://blog.hubspot.com)
Category: Blogging
Fine.
Forget community. Forget conversation. There's a far simpler, far more measurable reason to blog: search engine rankings.
13 Comments
Comments
I agree that this is a smart reason to blog and one that is not as frequently emphasized. But we've all seen business blogs that are all business and no personality. A blog (or a blogger) can't exist in a vacuum, if you aren't relevant to what's going on in your blogspace, people won't read.
The problem with framing it this way is that people don't hear the "well-written" part. They just hear "blog for search engine rankings" and then spew a whole boatload of crap.
It's about time somebody came out and just said it this way... We all know it, just nobody is willing to say it that way.
re: "the well written part" very true. Even after a long meeting with the business suits responsible for a "strategic" business blog, within a week it was just dozens of posts comprised of cut 'n paste newswire bits, posted by users with offshore names. I imagine they succeeded in meeting their budget constraints, if nothing else.
Kind of - I think the one thing that this post really misses out on is that often, the best way of improving the SEO of a site using a blog is..... by starting/joing conversations and building community. Link out to other bloggers and you're more likely to get links back. And I think we all know where that leads.
Are you serious? Factoring SEO benefits into any blog effort is essential. Blogging purely for SEO sounds like a hamster wheel. Good luck getting momentum (and links) without personality and community.
Is this one of those "Build it and they will come?" advice posts? With millions of blogs out there, the only ones engines will notice are the ones where a Community is talking about it and linking to it.
Those of us with "real" blogs spend a lot of time deleting trackbacks from fake blogs that exist for marketing purposes only. They're absolute junk and annoying as hell.
agree with all the above posts. the trick to this that most businesses never seem to "get" is that you can't just grab a random employee and hand them the keys to your company blog. It has to be someone with writing skills, an interest and knowledge in the topics being written about, and an understanding of the blogosphere and how to work within it (not to mention some understanding of how blog software works). You need to hire a BLOGGER, not a copywriter.
I also agree with all the comments here. The point of this post is not to devalue conversation or community, but to debunk the notion that business blogging is some sort of soft, unmeasurable time-sink for marketing folks. If you approach it from the SEO perspective, blogging's ROI is highly measurable.
And, yes, it's absolutely true that the most successful blogs will be those that have great community and conversation (I wouldn't be commenting here if I didn't believe that;-)). It's just harder to measure the returns of those parts of the blog.
@rickburnes, actually you CAN measure community and conversation elements with social media monitoring tools. Radian6, BuzzLogic, Collective Intellect, Converseon and many others offer this kind of data collection, analysis and reporting on blogs.
Agree with the sentiments expressed here of writing for search engines as opposed to readers. If the focus isn't on content/audience, the value of the blog will be limited. Consequently, it will attract fewer links and struggle to generate rankings.
I'm not sure that the blog post is saying that a business should go out and get a blog for the sole purpose of traffic, but that it's one important element that works in conjunction with community, content etc.
It's also worth noting that such a concept is particularly worthwhile for long tail searches that occur naturally when writing posts that aren't overly optimised.
I see search engine rankings as the side benefit. Rankings also increase through community... If you build a solid community then you will gain natural inbound links and the crowd will source your content to the farthest reaches of the social web which also has a positive effect on rankings.
Foregoing community for the purpose of rankings is a mistake when it is the community that will contribute to and enhance your rankings.