From an SEO point of view, I’ve emphasized on the importance of SEO blogging at “Have Your Started Marketing Blog or Blog Marketing Yet?” and other posts, but I’m telling now that SEO blogging isn’t enough by itself if all you do is a perfect content creation and optimization inside your blog!
Let’s face it this way. Internet is getting more and more interactive these days. It requires you to connect to others. Blogging is about building relationship with your readers. They’re not just your subscribers. Let’s put it this way: Do you always receive friends or sometimes visit friends at their places too? Is it possible to keep the relationship and grow it by following only one of these methods? The answer is definitely negative.
What Else Should Be Done?
Imagine you’re perfect in what you need to write for your audience, you know how to attract search engines as well as human visitors to your blog by the posts you write, and so on. What else is there to be done?
Well, a whole lot of things like:
- Go out to the social media and participate in their discussions,
- Comment on other bloggers’ posts at their sites,
- Write articles and post to article directories,
- Write press releases and submit them to PR websites,
- Build your own pages at social media and create some content there,
- Register for Twitter, follow others and get followers,
- Record your content as audio files and submit them to podcast directories,
- Film your product, service, interview, etc and submit them to video directories,
- and so on.
This list can go on and on for a long time. I don’t even know how long it could be. It all depends on what can help your business more than other strategies. Online marketing has got various channels and many of them can affect your search engine ranking significantly as search engines move toward universal search and blend search results.
Building a great site or blog and staying there for the rest of your online life brings nothing but walls around you. Blogging isn’t enough by itself if promotion is absent. In whatever you do, there are certain SEO tips that could apply. You should learn and apply them. One thing is always true about whatever you do: Keywords make your roadmap to success. Use them moderately anywhere possible. They are the tools for winning more attention from your potential followers, fans, clients, etc.
A Little about Universal Search
Take a look around you and see what results you get for the search queries in Google, Bing, etc. Are they only text links plus a description and a URL in green as the last line? No. You see video results, news, images, blogs, maps, etc at the same page. The interesting thing is that they are in organic SEO results.
Another important fact for you is that even huge companies use this opportunity for getting noticed. They’ve been heard over and over again for decades, but insist on producing more content at other sites and optimizing them. Why? Because of finding more audience as well as getting indexed and ranked better at search engines.
To test what I’m explaining here, go to Google Videos or Bing Videos and search for some breaking news you hear these days from any media and you will see where the results are coming from. That’s what I mean by saying “blogging isn’t enough!” everyone needs better search engine visibility.
This is great advice and we rarely see this “comprehensive” approach recommended for small business. Most of the firms we help with Internet Marketing have little more than a “brochure-style” website.
Unfortunately, we’ve experienced a great deal of difficulty getting clients to take a broader approach to internet marketing. They are unwilling to take the time to do the blogging, blog commenting, article creation, tec. required for a true internet marketing campaign.
They’ve also been reluctant to pay their employees to do the same. In most cases, we’ve been forced to not only create the Internet Marketing campaign but to implement it as well.
While we are always willing to do this for clients, the resulting blogs and blog comments tend to ring a little less authentic because they were written by a surrogate.
Duane Coleman
Great article post! Blog marketing is definately a solution to get traffic to our websites. This is something I do for small local business to promote their products or services. Like what you mentioned in your article, we have to maximize other things such as video or article submissions because everyone needs a better search engine visibility. Thanks for the info and keep it up.
I wonder if there being multiple ways of being found (video, images, etc.) that you should attempt to have your company in all these formats in some way.
Yes, it definitely helps, specially because search engines list the videos, images, news, products, etc along with other search results these days.
Actually it helps and is recommended to launch such online marketing campaign to utilize any channel that delivers organic SEO ranking with long-lasting results.