Where Does Blogging Fit Into SEO

[ChristinaRadisic]

I read an article yesterday that said blogging comes under the heading of social media, which is at the top of the so called SEO pyramid.  I have taken this to mean less time should be spent in social media compared to other areas of SEO.

Yet content creation was at the bottom of the pyramid (more time allocation here).  Isn't blogging part of content creation?

I would have thought there is a limit to what can be done for service/product & landing pages.  Whereas blogs are a great way to produce more unique content for a website.

Any clarification would be appreciated.

Thanks - Christina

[EGOL]

Here is how blogging works for me...

On a retail site I have a blog where I post on topics such as"how to use the product"... "how to select the product"... "how to fix the product"..  "show what was made with the product"... "history of the product"....  "answers to the most common questions we get about the product":.. "off-the-wall stuff about the product and trivia".

Then we have a big FAQ page that helps people find the blog post they need to answer their question.

For SEO, this blog generates content for non-transactional queries.  In some niches there is more search for non-transactional queries than their is for transactional queries.  When someone lands on one of these blog pages we have house ads and links to pages where they can purchase the product that they read about or the supplies that they need or a book.

These blog post attract traffic that was non-transactional but we get transactions out of them.  They also get us into the SERPs that our competitors have not even thought about - because they are so focused on transactional queries and are too damn lazy to write helpful stuff for their customers.  As a result, we have more informative content than all of our competitors combined.  Then when people land on our site they say.. "WOW"... and many tell us that they purchased from our site because we have so much information.

On an information site I have a blog that tracks industry news and gets up to 30 very short posts  per week.  I post a couple sentences about a news story and link to it.  It has an RSS feed and an email feed that people can subscribe to.  About 20,000 people subscribe because three times a week they get an email message with 8 to 10 links to news links (on other websites) about the industry that the work in.

The news posts are noindexed because they are so short and would cause panda problems.  However, each news posts goes into at least two categories (topic and geographic location).  We have 150 categories and they bring in tens of thousands of visitors per month.  Some people subscribe  to the feed for some of the category pages instead of the general feed.   Lots of industry websites link to this blog, some republish the feed in a widget - a few on their homepages.

When we have a new article on this site we give it prime position in the blog and the feed and that immediately shows new content to thousands of interested people, some of them share it right away, other email it... so it gives new content on our site a great lunge out of the gate.  Occasionally we include a sales item as a post and that pulls in a few immediate sales.

If we have any problem with this it is that so many people bug us because they want us to feature their content or shout out their product or include information about promotions, obits, etc.   We have to say "no" to a lot of people because nobody wants to read their personnel announcements or follow  a link to their chest thumping blog post or land on their linkbuilder crap.  A few people are very helpful and send us great stuff and that reduces the work for us.

[AndreVanKets]

The take away i assume you should have got from that article is that blogging is both a part Social and SEO.

1. Google is attracted to fresh content. The more you blog, the more Google visits your website which in tern adds more content to its index resulting in more organic search traffic.

2.) Blogging on your site is a great way to engage with your customers and visitors on your site. The same way you engage in Social media. Blogging and sharing the content on social platforms is essentially a part of your social strategy.

In a nutshell, creating blog posts oftent increases the engagement you have with your audience (on social channels as well as comments on your blog) and at the same time improves the over all SEO of your site.

Hope that helps!

Greg

[ChristinaRadisic]

I use my blog in the same way, I try to solve customers problems as well as my own, email it out to subscribers and share on social media channels.

However, the article I read made me wonder is there some weird difference between content and blogging.

[ChristinaRadisic]

Thanks Andre, that's the opinion I had before I read the article.

Must be the amount of sun the UK is being exposed to, which is making me question my SEO knowledge.

[EGOL]

I think that depends who you ask and how they build their blog into their website.

To me, a blog post is a way to publish quick content.... communicate in a couple of sentences or write a short article that can be done in a hour or two.

Real content (at least to me) is something more substantive - 500 to 5000 words accompanied by photos, charts, data.

If you do a little work to integrate your blog posts into your website then blog posts can be a lot more.  They can be incorporated into FAQs,  used in "related content" boxes that display across your site, be integrated with images and snippets into your category pages, and linked to for "more information" on your product pages... then you have more than a blog, you are using it like valuable content.

[ChristinaRadisic]

Thanks for the clarification, that makes more sense.

Christina