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Drawing the line between blog and SEO content

Guest post by: Bonnie Harris

Article Overview: Sorting out blog and SEO content. There are different strategies to consider for each.

Drawing the line between blog and SEO content

Recently I’ve noticed that the line is becoming blurred between blog and SEO content. Theoretically, anything you post online must by SEO-friendly, but there are still noticeable differences – or so it used to be. If you’ve been following, you know by now I don’t like to fit blog writing into a limited definition as many do. But I also don’t think that absolutely anything goes because you don’t want your blog to become overly technical. Before I get into where that line should be drawn, let’s consider what role an SEO article (you know the type that’s often produced by the major SEO firms) plays versus what a blog should accomplish:

SEO Articles

• They’re designed to drive in traffic
• Headers, extensive use of keywords and other strategies are all used to drive hits, but the content doesn’t need to be compelling or entirely exciting to read
• Typically SEO articles that are designed for the purpose of driving traffic contain basic facts and information with no analysis

Note: there are other definitions of SEO articles, but to keep this idea going, work with me, and think about written pieces that primarily have technical motivations.

Blogs

You want your blog articles to accomplish the above things, but a bit more effort needs to go into making the content unique and interesting. With your blog, it’s not about the numbers only as it can be with SEO articles. You want to form a connection with your readers and have your numbers increase that way.

Drawing the Line

While you can and should apply many SEO strategies to your blog, there are some things you’d do with SEO articles that you may want to think twice about before introducing them to your blog as well:

• Overuse of marketing-related headers – I’m all for separating blog posts logically with use of headers. But, I’m not a big fan of incorporating the more sales-focused headers like what you’d include in SEO articles. If you’re including a call to action in your blog already, you don’t necessarily need to draw further attention to it with a ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Use Our Services’ header.
• Overuse of keywords – you DO need to include keywords on your blog, and lots of them, but you do want readability to remain a priority to make your blog enjoyable for readers. With blogs, I like to use what I call ‘common sense keywords’. You know, they’re the ones that fit into the context already, but you ensure you consciously include them as well!
• Overuse of links – there is such a thing as too much self-promotion. While you may want your SEO articles to link to each and every page/site of yours, pick a couple of the important ones for your blogs.

What it all comes down to is putting your readers first. Draw the line and set limits based on what you’d like to see when you’re reading!

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Article Tags: Blogging, blogging for business, learn to blog, SEO and blogs



Related Forum Posts
Re: Blog entries... how many is too much? - I do feel that blog should be updated on regular basis after an interval of 4-5 days. However the quality of your content is more important than the bulkness of your content. If your content is interesting and you can manage to update your blog regularly then it will surely help you gain more clicks and higher rankings on search engines.
Re: 7 Top Blog Design Tips - Thanks for sharing those tips, I agree with all of them. They are must-haves for any successful blog. And I'm starting to think that for my own blog, I really need an Archives page as well, because the categories navigation is not really thorough enough for my liking. I think the main point about blogging is that design always comes second to content. And that design shouldn't take away from the content in any way.
Re: Blog sells for up to $15 million - I think selling a blog for $15 million is insane. It must have been generating tremendous traffic, and have an intricate backlinking network. I wonder how the content will be revised with new owners on the site. Most blogs' content is derived from some individual. To extract that individual and replace them with someone else would essentially mean the flare of the blog in the first place may be gone. Maybe I'm overanalyzing it.
Re: Help with adwords - We strayed a bit from our Adwords when the campaigns began to struggle a bit this year - we replaced our efforts into pure content creation (blogging) and have been seeing much better results. Find a knowledgeable web person - have them setup a blogging tool on your own website (so use your own instance of something like WordPress rather than having a blog on another application like Blogger.com etc.). Start creating your own content - you know your own business the best, and you are likely in the best position to generate serious amounts of content about your business. In the end you will still have this content, and it will be on your own site. Adword campaigns expire, yet the content you create will be yours forever! Good Luck!
Re: Tactics for Blog Traffic - I think also by posting to your blog at least 3-4 times a week, the search engines will favor your blog more one they catch on that there is constantly new fresh content available there. So keep updating your blog on a regular basis this is a big help. MichelleJ


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