Tag Archives: Blog Publishing

What’s better, longer or shorter blog posts?

There was a brief exchange somewhere between two prominent bloggers whether it’s better to publish longer blog posts (1000-2000 words) or shorter (300-500 words). What do I advise to my clients?

Once again, what I normally do, I say it depends on the topic, or the need of the hour. I favor both long and short blog posts.

In fact length doesn’t really matter, as long as you know what you are writing, and how much detail is apt for your audience. What’s important is regularity and relevance.

Case for longer blog posts

Longer blog posts are good if you are publishing an analytical piece that has lots of information, lots of sections and subsections. It can be a detailed report on something. It can be some account of an event that happened at your workplace, or at a conference. It can be a detailed research. Such posts can be highly useful and they have a greater chance of going viral. Since they pack lots of highly useful information they also enjoy better search engine rankings.

Case for shorter blog posts

Shorter blog posts are easier to write and publish. You don’t have to make lots of effort. You can publish shorter blog posts with greater frequency. Besides, quickly publishing a couple of paragraphs is better than having no content simply because you don’t have enough time to create longer, more comprehensive blog posts.

Eventually, what matters is having lots of relevant content on a regular basis. Keep in mind that the fundamental purpose of creating content on your website or blog is keeping your visitors informed as much as possible.

What is guest blogging?

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Guest blogging is one of the best ways of making your content available to a wider audience, getting high-value link-backs for your website and blog, and consequently, increase your search engine rankings. Many people make it an integral part of their overall content marketing and SEO strategy.

There are millions of blogs out there on various themes and niches. If you are a web design company you will be focusing on web design blogs or at least blogs publishing content on related topics. If you’re a fashion designer then you will be looking for a blog talking about fashion or clothes, or accessories.

Guest blogging is writing blog posts for one of these blogs. Some of the blogs are very popular. For instance, Digital Photography School is one of the best-known blogs on photography and there are many professional as well as amateur photographers who aspire to write for this blog.

When your posts are published on one of these well-known and high-traffic blogs, via the resource box (that briefly talks about the author; what’s her name, what she does, link to her website or blog and probably her twitter handle) they also publish your profile. Through this profile people can come to your website if they want to. Guest blogging in such way helps you in following ways:

It highlights your content and your abilities in front of a wider audience. Suppose on your own blog you just get 100-300 visitors every day. But on a famous blog your blog post will be read by 10,000-50,000 (even more) readers in a single day.
It boosts your search engine rankings. Search engine algorithms, before ranking your website need to know how many genuine blogs and websites are linking back to you. If they link to you it means your website has valuable content and valuable content is what the search engines are looking for. It’s kind of a validation when people link back to you. Since they won’t just link to you they need a reason. One reason might be finding a valuable blog post or an article on your website and then linking to it from within one of their own blog posts or articles. The other reason is, when they publish your article they link back to you through the resource box.
It sends direct traffic. Since your link is published along with the guest blog post many people will be clicking the link to check out your website.
It sends indirect traffic. If your guest post becomes popular other bloggers and web masters may link to it from their own blog posts and this will send you further traffic.

So this is how guest blogging benefits you. Famous blogger Leo Babauta is known to have garnered 15,000 RSS subscribers for his blog in a single month by publishing his content as a guest blogger on scores of high traffic websites and blogs.

How to bring conversation back to blogging

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Today in the afternoon I came across this blog post in which the author asks, “Have conversations left blogging?”

It’s a pertinent question. Blogs are as much about engagement as they are about content. A big reason why blogging flourished was the readers’ ability to participate in the thought process. In some instances a blog post containing just a few paragraphs would attract 100s of comments. In fact there used to be so many comments that plug-ins and widgets were created to paginate the commenting section.

What happened then?

I don’t think much has happened. I don’t agree that it is the end of conversation and engagement in blogging and I don’t believe, as many do, that “blogging craze” is ebbing. Of course with the onset of social media people’s focus has shifted to other, I would say quicker, forms of expression, but people who were seriously blogging a couple of years ago, are still seriously blogging and they still have a serious audience.

Nonetheless, engagement has gone down and that’s because people’s desire to express themselves and to be a part of a community is being taken care of by Facebook and Twitter and other such social networking websites.

But it doesn’t mean that audience cannot be engaged on blogs. Create engaging content. Create content that makes people want to interact with you there and then. Stop publishing the same old topics that you were talking about last year. Even if the topics are same, as I talked in this blog post titled “How to help your business stand out with unique content”, you can always give them a new twist to make people interested in them.

Aside from that you can also focus on plug-ins and add-ons that bring features like Facebook and Twitter right into your blogging. For instance, some blogs like TechCrunch allow their visitors to leave comments using their Facebook accounts rather than having to create separate accounts.

Similarly we can have some applications that can incorporate Twitter interface right into blogging platforms so people can use their Twitter accounts to interact on blogs.

Why there is more conversation on Facebook and Twitter and less on blogs?

First, it’s the audience. If you have 2000 followers on Twitter you know that whenever you post something it is going to be seen by most of your followers. I know this is a misconception but this is the psychology behind the thinking. On a blog on the other hand, people wonder how many are going to see the comment. On the contrary your comments experience more exposure on blogs rather than on Twitter and Facebook.

There is another thing: a big motivation behind leaving comments on various blogs used to be backlinks. When you left comments on other blogs you created backlinks to your own blog and this was known to help your search engine rankings. Then search engines like Google stopped attributing benefits to this exercise and this impacted commenting adversely.

So now even if quantity has decreased the quality of commenting has certainly gone up because people leave comments to add value to the ongoing discussion rather than simply to get a backlink.

You have published a new blog post. Great. But what now?

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I can totally relate to the overwhelming sense of achievement when you manage to write a complete blog post and then publish it after fully optimizing it and using the right images. But you know what, this does not ensure good visibility and exposure, whether it is search engines or social media/networking websites.

Once you have a new blog post you need to let the world know about it. Search engine optimizing is one way, of course. If you have a fully optimized blog post the search engines are bound to rank it well once they have indexed it. Is it that simple? With tough competition from legitimate as well as a illegitimate content, you stand little chance getting targeted traffic no matter how great your blog post is.

So what do you do to spread the word around? Many things actually? Some of them are:

Fill up all the Seo details like the title tag, description and keywords. By installing the All in One Seo Pack can give you lots of extra power, for instance having a different page title and a different blog headline.
Do a keyword analysis. With all the Google Penguin update confusions your confidence might be a bit shaken vis-a-vis using keywords, but they are still important. So make sure you have used the right keywords in your blog post and edit it if need be.
Post your new link on Twitter and Facebook (you have Twitter and Facebook accounts, right?)
Sort out your syndication. Make sure your XML and RSS feeds are updated.
Send an e-mail notification. You should definitely build a mailing list (this is not to be done after publishing the latest blog post – it is an ongoing activity) so that whenever you publish a new blog post you can send an e-mail notification to all your subscribers.

This blog post actually lists 12 things you can do (it’s an older blog post but I just came across it) after publishing your new blog post. You can use the things mentioned in this blog post as a checklist, although you should definitely have your own checklist too.

Quality content is the best SEO

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As rightly mentioned in this blog post titled “The big SEO secret for bloggers” there is nothing like high-quality content when it comes to improving your search engine rankings. Long gone are the days when you had to use “SEO tactics” to get good rankings; right now it is primarily the quality of your content that decides what rankings you’re going to enjoy over the search engines.

So it doesn’t matter how you publish and organize your content? Sure, it does. You have to organise your content in such a manner that it is easier for search engine crawlers to find your content, index it and rank it.

Do your niche keywords matter?

They do. But you don’t have to go overboard. Using “keywords” doesn’t mean a certain density, it just means using the right words to convey your message and prepare your content. For instance, if I write a blog post on content writing, this expression should appear in the text rather than “content preparing” or “content formulating” (I know it doesn’t mean anything, but it is just an example). The basic idea is, delivering some value that makes people come to your blog or website again and again, and this is what search engines are looking for. They want to present relevant links to their users.

Doesn’t bad content rank well any more?

It surely does. Search engine algorithms are not foolproof and sometimes links that don’t deserve good rankings get good rankings. But they don’t enjoy good rankings for long, sooner or later they are discovered and then allocated ranking they deserve.

Spend more and more time on producing better quality content rather than lots of content and you will see a marked difference in your search engine rankings and also, your conversion rate.