What is the purpose of a blog? More importantly, what is your purpose in hosting a blog? If your answer is purely SEO then I suggest you think again. Blogs can and do help with the overall search ranking of a site when optimized effectively, they are however far more powerful than simple SEO.
Blogs designed for pure SEO are often not terribly user friendly. In fact, whilst they may rate well early, overtime they will struggle to maintain high ratings. Because they are not user friendly, they can scare away more potential business than they attract.
You can often look at a blog as being your receptionist in your business. Most businesses look to hire an attractive yet very efficient person for this role. They are the first and often last person a visitor will see when they visit your business. They are certainly the first person they hear when they telephone.
Your blog is no different. Yes, you optimize it to rank well in the search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Because it ranks well it will receive endless traffic and where is that traffic going, to your blog. The first face the internet visitor is going to see is your blogs. Is it ready? Is it user friendly? Does it say “hi, welcome to …… what can I do for you?”
From your blog, you need to funnel your traffic to your website where the final act can be delivered, be it a sale, newsletter signup or contact form. How your blog is presented will determine whether or not your traffic is funneled to your blog, or back to Google for another search option.
I dont agree with your title. Any blog associated with any business is there for no other reason other than to generate traffic. I presume yours included.
Agree that design is important and it needs to be user friendly, something my own site needs to be managed better
I’ve bookmarked your site for future reference.
I agree with Admin. You can write a blog that is purely for SEO purposes and still drive traffic to your website. The challenge is in creating content that isn’t spammy in nature. You still want the content to have value.
I don’t quite agree ‘Admin’. Optimized to generate traffic is fine, but surely that is not the only reason to have a blog. Even if it is, are search engines the only place you intend looking for traffic.
In the current world of social marketing and social networking, your site needs to be able to interact with visitors so there needs to be a little social optimization as well.
As this post suggest, you may receive plenty of traffic from the search engines but if the site doesn’t answer their queries, they wont move onto your website.
The post is an interesting perspective, blogs need do need to be optimized for more than one traffic source these days.
les
Well said, Les.
The Real SEO is just to tell your prospects that they need to create quality content in order to achieve high rankings.
Thanks a lot for all of you.I really enjoyed these articles.