How does my blog help in SEO
-
Hi
I have recently put a wordpress blog on my site and have employed a few blog writers, each putting 2 or 3 posts per week up. There brief so far has been to write interesting, humorous and topical articles.
Stupid as it may seem I have done this only because the general consensus seemed to be "you must have a blog for SEO"
Does it help?
Assuming it does:
Should I post the same articles to my facebook page and or anywhere else?
Should the articles have anchor text linking back to my site?
What should I do to make it work well?
Thanks in advance
Andy
-
Hi Andy,
This is what I did one site that seemed to work very well - 350% increase (over previous year) in traffic 7 months after adding image galleries and blog for a tile company.
Lots of descriptive content with keywords on each image on page.
Images in blog posts 2-3 per week. Share posts and images out to interior design bloggers and print media with online presence.
Generate lots of posts (several per week) by external bloggers and media that link back to the tile company site images and image collection galleries, home page, and blog posts.
I repost their posts on the tile company's blog that "so and so design blogger" did this great post with excerpt and link to them. These are all follow links in WordPress. Link out generously.
Tweet out from blog the post with URL 3-5/day 5 days a week amid general conversation on twitter. Credit the great blogger who shared your content. Share post with URL on Facebook.
Pin like crazy.
GIve out, give credit to others, and watch it come back.
Have fun!
-
It's not so much that you have to have a blog, but you do have to have content on your website.
Awesome content that is link-able = Good for SEO
Also, don't make your blog a stand alone thing. If a post is relevant to a page on your website, make sure to link over to it!
-
I heard on the grapevine, that google would soon be looking at penalising content that is put up for purely SEO reasons i.e. put up for the sake of putting it up, and my thoughts are one of the big things they would use to filter out thsi sort of stuff would be social signals, so my view is as others have already said to put only link worthy and shareable content. I think content purely on its quality and topic is not going to cut it without these social signals. I would forget simply using good writers and look at the more creative and social media savvy writers instead. Try to get discussion around your posts instead of shouting it out at people by social.
-
Relevant anchor text back to your site is a good thing, as you want people to be able to make the connection and get the SEO benefit. Yes, blogs are presented as "you need" but keep in mind there's a lot of hype with this stuff. How you do it is more important than doing it - as Alan mentioned, you need to have a blog people will want to link it for it to really benefit.
-
"you must have a blog for SEO"
ha... those are blog evangelists talking... now everyone is saying that "you must have a FB presence"... and that isn't correct 100% of the time either.
In my opinion, most of the blogs on the web "for SEO purposes" are weak efforts that have negative ROI.
I agree with Alan in that you need a blog that is enjoyed, shared, liked, linked.
So, ask youself if you are publishing trash just to have a blog? Is it attracting any links, likes, shares. Is it pulling any traffic. If those things are not happening then you need to change your authors, your topics or just close the blog down.
-
A blog can help, but often does not. you need to have a blog that people want top link to, it much be relevant and link back to your landing pages
make sure content is relevant, try to attract links.
dont post the same artciles anywhere else, this will lead to duplicate content.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How important are author bios to SEO?
I'm trying to understand the importance of author bios to Google and its latest algorithms. Some say author bios affect rankings, but others say that has not been specifically stated by Google — but it does affect the user experience. Anyone have input on this? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | SallieJ0 -
Old school SEO tools / software / websites
Hey Mozzers, I am doing some research and wonder if you can help me out? Before Moz, Hubspot, Majestic, Screaming Frog and all the other awesome SEO tools we use today what were the SEO tools / software / websites that were used for aiding SEO? I guess we can add the recently closed Yahoo! Directory for starters! Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | RikkiD220 -
Puzzling Penalty Question - Need Expert Help
I'm turning to the Moz Community because we're completely stumped. I actually work at a digital agency, our specialism being SEO. We've dealt with Google penalties before and have always found it fairly easy to identify the source the problem when someone comes to us with a sudden keyword/traffic drop. I'll briefly outline what we've experienced: We took on a client looking for SEO a few months ago. They had an OK site, with a small but high quality and natural link profile, but very little organic visibility. The client is an IT consultancy based in London, so there's a lot of competition for their keywords. All technical issues on the site were addressed, pages were carefully keyword targeted (obviously not in a spammy way) and on-site content, such as services pages, which were quite thin, were enriched with more user focused content. Interesting, shareable content was starting to be created and some basic outreach work had started. Things were starting to pick up. The site started showing and growing for some very relevant keywords in Google, a good range and at different levels (mostly sitting around page 3-4) depending on competition. Local keywords, particularly, were doing well, with a good number sitting on page 1-2. The keywords were starting to deliver a gentle stream of relevant traffic and user behaviour on-site looked good. Then, as of the 28th September 2015, it all went wrong. Our client's site virtually dropped from existence as far as Google was concerned. They literally lost all of their keywords. Our client even dropped hundreds of places for their own brand name. They also lost all rankings for super low competition, non-business terms they were ranking for. So, there's the problem. The keywords have not shown any sign of recovery at all yet and we're, understandably, panicking. The worst thing is that we can't identify what has caused this catastrophic drop. It looks like a Google penalty, but there's nothing we can find that would cause it. There are no messages or warnings in GWT. The link profile is small but high quality. When we started the content was a bit on the thin side, but this doesn't really look like a Panda penalty, and seems far too severe. The site is technically sound. There is no duplicate content issues or plaigarised content. The site is being indexed fine. Moz gives the site a spam score of 1 (our of 11 (i think that's right)). The site is on an ok server, which hasn't been blacklisted or anything. We've tried everything we can to identify a problem. And that's where you guys come in. Any ideas? Anyone seen anything similar around the same time? Unfortunately, we can't share our clients' site's name/URL, but feel free to ask any questions you want and we'll do our best to provide info.
Algorithm Updates | | MRSWebSolutions0 -
How Additional Characters and Numbers in URL affect SEO
Hi fellow SEOmozers, I noticed that a lot of websites have additional characters and words at the end of the URL in addition keyword optimized URL. Mostly for E-Commerce sites For example: www.yoursite.com/category/keyword?id=12345&Keyword--Category--cm_jdkfls_dklj or wwww.yoursite.com/category/keyword#83939=-37292 My question is how does the additional characters or parameters(not necessarily tracking parameters) affect SEO? Does it matter if i have additional keywords in the additional stuff in the URL (1st url example)? If you can provide more information, that would be helpful. Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | TommyTan0 -
Giving Follow Links is good for SEO ?
Hi Friends, In my website I am having PR 5 for my home page and I am giving 25 external links as follow link. Reason is all links are natural links so I gave as follow links. Will my website will be decrease PR in future. 1) Should I need to give as nofollow links? 2) Can I update only for reciprocal links as nofollow? In total 25 links I have 3 reciprocal links only. Your suggestions on this are important for me. I had watched couple of videos from Matt Cutts on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4UJS-LFRTU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g37bwBlifnk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg1A5wF3Ac4 Thanks for your valuable time.
Algorithm Updates | | zco_seo0 -
Can anybody help me please!
Hi, I'm not an SEO expert! I'm even not a professional Webmaster. I'm a professional "Private Investigator", owner of a PI Agency in Bangkok (Thailand). Our website (thailand-investigation.com) was ranked, 18 months ago, on the 1st page in Google, Bing & Yahoo search engines for our major keywords! We are still good in Bing and Yahoo but we dropped to the 5th page and more in Google! I do not know when it happened? I was busy working managing my business and was not taking care on our website (BIG mistake)!I realized it beginning of august 2012. I redesigned our website, ad content, new pages...Started 2 months ago, but still no result with our home page! The new pages start to show-up!??? But still far away! I need to understand why? What is going on!? Why Google "de-ranked" us? And what to do to recover!!! I'm here to learn, try to understand and take your advises! So, please give me advises and if someone is ready to audit my website and explain me what to do, I'm willing to pay the service [not to much 😉 ]. Thanks, helpButton.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | MichelMauquoi0 -
Does the use of an underscore in filenames adversely affect SEO
We have had a page which until recently was ranked first or second by Google UK and also worldwide for the term "Snowbee". It is now no longer in the top 50. I ran a page optimization report on the url and had a very good score. The only criticism was that I had used an atypical character in the url. The only unusual character was an underscore "_" We use the underscore in most file names without apparent problems with search engines. In fact they are automatically created in html files by our ecommerce software, and other pages do not seem to have been so adversely affected. Should we discontinue this practice? It will be difficult but I'm sure we can overcome this if this is the reason why Google has marked us down. I attach images of the SEO Report pages 8fDPi.jpg AdLIn.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | FFTCOUK0 -
Question about Local / Regional SEO
Good Morning Moz Community, I have a local SEO/regional SEO question. I apologize if this question is duplicated from another area on this forum but, a query of the term Regional SEO showed no results, as did similar queries. Please preference this entire question with "Knowing what we know about the most recent changes to local search" I know what has worked in the past, my concern is Now. Working with a heavily regulated client that is regional, mostly East Coast US. They are in Financial Services and state licensing is a requirement. They are licensed in 15 states. Obviously, it would look foolish, in this day in age, to Title Tag individual pages with local modifiers and have numerous pages covering a similar topic with not much difference than localized modifiers in front of the keyword. I've never found that SE's can understand broad regional terms such as New England or Mid Atlantic or Southeast or Northeast, if someone knows different please share. Aside from an exact match search. The client does have 7 offices in various states. Perfectly matching and consistent listings in G Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local was step one and all their locations are now in those services and there are many more smaller local citation listings are in the works. We have also successfully implemented a plan to generate great reviews from actual customers, for each location, they're receiving a few a day right now. Their local places listings, where they have physical locations, are doing very well but: 1. What would the community's suggestion be on generating more targeted traffic in the 8 states where they have no physical location? 2. The client wants to begin creating smaller blogs that are highly localized to the states and major population centers that they do not have a physical location in. There is an open check book to dedicate to this effort however, I do a lot of work in this industry so I want to offer the best possible, most up to date advice, my concern is that these efforts will have two results: a. be obscured by the ”7 pack" by companies with local brick and mortar b. would detract from the equity built in their existing blog by generating content in other domains, I would prefer to continue growing the main blog. 3. As a follow up, it has been documented that Google is now using the same algorithm for local, personal and personalized, that being the case, is there any value in building links to you Places page? Can you optimize your Places page by using the same off site techniques as you would traditionally? Sorry to kill you with such a long question on a Sunday 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | dogflog1