Question:

As Social Media seems to be increasingly important in the world of websites, I’ve recently set up a blog for my company.  But I was wondering whether I should be applying the same principles to the blog as to the site where Search Engine Optimisation is concerned.  Do blogs carry any SEO weight or are they purely for people rather than search engines?

James, London

Answer:

Hi James,

Once upon a time, I would have been able to answer this question very quickly and easily, however as Google continues to move the goal posts, the relationship between blogs and SEO has become ever so slightly more evolved.

In general terms, blogs are written for people, and should continue to be so.  Content should be fresh, interesting and relevant to your audience, and rather than including links for the sake of link building, links should be included in order to signpost your readers to other relevant and interesting material.  However, there is of course nothing to stop one of your links from being key phrase rich and pointing to your own site so that you can benefit from an internal link or two…

Whilst blogs are, for the most part, unlikely to have long term sustained rankings as websites do, with the introduction of Google’s real time updates, you are likely to see blog posts appearing on the front page of Google more often than ever before.  Bear in mind though, that these are likely to drop out of the rankings as quickly as they appeared as they are replaced with other blog posts or Twitter feeds.  Why is this important I hear you ask?  Because as we know, Google loves and cherishes fresh content.  So, providing that your blog is attached to your website, those search engine spiders will see that you are regularly updating and contributing to your site and will start to return to your site more often, which is in itself a great help to both the blog and the site rankings. 

Google and Technorati’s latest forays into specific blog searches are likely to mean that the goalposts are about to move again, but in answer to your question, it is my belief that blogs should continue to be written by people for people.  However, if you have the time, it is certainly worth adding a few of the basic SEO principles in here and there.

I hope this has answered your question

Kind regards,

LeadGenerators

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