How to determine the best keyword strategy/purpose for a blog in 2014?

[vernonmack]

Currently our blog has been used to add content to our site targeting desired keywords (fairly top-level). For example, if we wanted organic traffic for "Some City Contractors" (by no means a longtail), we would write a blog using this key term in the Title, url, a sub heading perhaps and a couple variations of the term throughout any subheadings or body copy. I think the idea was that since there was so much work to be done to get the static site pages optimized (rewriting that copy), we just decided to crank out fresh content                  targeting these high level KWs, assuming a search engine result is a result and as long as we got real estate there, a click and there was a link to the relevant site page in that article, we were golden (well, maybe not golden, but good).

We are now building a new, responsive site and taking care to make sure that the site's relevant pages are nicely optimized. Higher level page are optimized for high-level KWs and sub pages target longer tail KWs identified in KW research.

Along the way an SEO said it was bad that so many of our blogs were better optimized for key terms than the actual site pages (i.e. service pages, things you would find in the main nav.) This does make some sense to me so...

So what is the new purpose for our blogs in this new age of Google and ever-increasing social influence?

Should we forget about focusing on KWs already addressed within the site's core? Focus more on interesting, super long-tails that maybe don't have a ton of traffic, but are relevant (and oh by they way, something like 3 million terms are searched for the first time each day, right?)? Or forget the keywords, as long as the topic is relevant and interesting the real pay-off is in social interactions.

I'm really interested to see if this results in clear-cut answer or more of a lengthy discussion...

[vmialik]

Your questions can have many suggestions and little tips but by far one of the biggest ones answers this part of your question: "So what is the new purpose for our blogs in this new age of Google and ever-increasing social influence?"

Produce engaging content, and be know as the authority in a certain topic and social shares, comments, and traffic will naturally come for an ever-increasing social influence. Its one of those easier said then done things.

Hope this helps!