Regular blogging is a great discipline to get into and indeed can be very enjoyable especially if you find your subject matter genuinely interesting. Most companies will build the blog into their main website which is the most common way to do it – it protects your brand and enhances the percentage of original content within your website (this is supposedly a Google algorithm factor).
However, it has been increasingly popular for SEO strategy to include blog creation. This in many cases involves cluttering up cyberspace with small blogs offering little user value and then generating a relevant but mediocre back link to your website.
So when writing this article I asked myself ‘how could this be done better’? What is the best practice in digital marketing terms with external blog creation?
– Build steady, regular high quality blog content over time. Fortnightly, weekly or daily blogs are all fine – if you can try and make as many of them between 500-2000 words in length this should allow you to give blog readers a great insight into your area. Statistically it also maximises the chance of someone linking to your article.
– Don’t make the blog an advertorial for your company – blogging in my view is social media activity so this shouldn’t be too salesy. There is nothing wrong with a product reference, but try to make a rule that 2-3 out of 10 blogs will have that direct reference.
– Remember that this blog can only ‘vote’ for your site once…I would do this with one site wide link in the blogroll area meaning that each time you blog, you get a another relevant back link. Excessive linking to your main website isn’t advisable – you don’t want to the blog to look for users or search engines as a ‘feeder site’. In Google’s eyes, this will help build authority for the link to your site.
– Build links to your blog. By doing this you will raise it’s prominence and put in long term foundations to both your blog and in doing so your main website.
– Syndicate links to your content via Facebook and Twitter. A no-brainer – let your fans know if you are generating genuine, quality content.
