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Are You Blogging Yet? Why Not?

 In SEO, SEO Content

are you blogging?If you are already blogging, read on anyway. I’d like to hear your thoughts. Tell me about your blogging experience. If you are not blogging – why aren’t you? Have you been reading the news?

Yes, the news! As I mentioned in my previous post on link building, incredibly, it was BIG news that JC Penny was exposed as having invested in a vast, inauthentic link-building scheme. And even the venerable Wall Street Journal has devoted many articles to the recent Google update. I hope you haven’t missed all this talk but let me summarize the most important point of the update and explain what this has to do with blogging.

Google has made a significant tweak to its algorithm to lower the influence of “content farms” and “link farms” on its ranking. Meaning, once again, in no uncertain terms, Google is trying to make it clear, if it wasn’t already, that it favors sites that have meaningful evidence of relevance, trust, and authority. This means, among other factors, they have natural, real, authentic, unpaid, inbound links from other sites that also have the same.

This is serious stuff. CNNMoney.com reports that mahalo.com laid off 10% of its staff last week, following Google’s change. Mahalo is a content farm, meaning its raison d’etre is to attract search engine traffic. With Google’s devaluing of sites like that, mahalo’s traffic has plummeted.

The upshot of all this is simple: You STILL NEED LINKS! But as I said, they need to be natural, real, authentic, and unpaid, and they need to come from sites that are also seen by Google as relevant, trusted and authoritative.

I’m sure you know that famous real estate dictum that smart property purchases are all about 3 things: location, location, location. Well, in building trustworthy relevant, link-magnet sites, there are also 3 equally critical factors: CONTENT, CONTENT, and CONTENT.

And what’s the best way to build relevant content fast? A blog. Google eats content. And LOVES blogs. Especially blogs built on WordPress.

But How Do You Manage a Blog?

Typically, when considering creating a blog, we see managing it and keeping it up to date as foreboding obstacles. Sure these are important. Nothing is worse than an abandoned blog. OK, I can think of some things that are worse than that, but clearly Google will not keep coming back to a dead blog — and neither will your readers — so you have to keep it fresh.

We’ll talk about this more in the future but a few tips for writing and promoting your blog.

  • – Write about what you know!
  • – Make your blog and email work together
  • – Archive your email blasts and refer to them
  • – Use your email blasts to write monthly “roundups” of blog content, with teasers and links to the most recent articles.
  • – Write once a month at first, but aim for once a week
  • – Pick your main navigation topics and write a post on each one, in rotation
  • – Invite guest blogger – a vendor or partner, to write a column
  • – Promote your blog via Facebook and Twitter

Here’s a blog just begun by our friends at sidekickmag.com – a great site for dentists with tons of content about dental technology and dental office design. As you can see, they will be using the blog to curate existing content deep in the site, making it fresh again!

You know you need content right? What are you waiting for? Please leave a comment with your experience or questions. And as always, we can help!

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