Don’t Blog Because It’s Good For SEO

There are many good reasons to start a blog. I’ll give you a few. Perhaps you want to share your specific expertise with the world. Maybe you want to give your company a voice that speaks directly to your clients/customers. Or maybe you just like writing. Here’s one good reason not to start a blog…because somebody told you it helps with SEO.

Blogs do not help you with SEO if you have nothing interesting to say! Let me explain why.

If you’re not saying anything interesting you won’t have any readers and you will quickly drop blogging like a bad bean pie. You’ll have a blog that just sits there and stinks up the rest of your site. Your visitors will come to check out your blog and think you’re a big a loser because you haven’t updated your blog in over a year. You need to have commitment and/or passion to blog consistently and doing it for SEO reasons won’t provide that.

If you think you are serious about starting a blog, here are three things to consider:

1. Choice of Subject Matter – Consider what your blog is going to be about before you start one. Don’t create blog posts that just link to products that you’re selling on your site. No one is going to read that stuff and the SEO benefit is marginal. The better the writing, the greater the chance that your blog will get read and get backlinks from other sites.

2. Post Regularly – Blogs can help with SEO if you post regularly. You need momentum. If you’re not posting regularly than most probably you will drop blogging like a bad habit. Bloggers really need to figure out how much time they can dedicate to a blog before they start one. If you are already low on time, forget about starting a blog. People don’t realize how much of a commitment it can be. There’s nothing worse for a sites image than a blog that hasn’t been touched in a long time. It screams “Hi! I don’t update my site! Please Click the back button!”

3. Reading Other Blogs – It can be very helpful to read other blogs to get ideas for your own blog and to see other writing styles. Another highly recommended thing you should do if you read other blogs is leave comments on other blogs and link back to you own blog in your name. If the blog is relevant to yours, it will help get interested readers coming to your blog. Similarly, trackbacks are another good way to get relevant visitors to your site. If you don’t know what trackbacks are, this explains what they are better than I can.

Blogging can make a huge impact on your traffic (and rankings) if you’re really really good at it. Some of the more successful blogs out there are ranking powerhouses and rank for almost anything they blog about. I’m not saying don’t try to start a blog, but you should know what you’re getting yourself into. I’m not sure what percentage of blogs fail after the first six months but i’d be willing to bet that the percentage is somewhere in the 90% range. So, are you really ready to start blogging???