Blogging - How Much Is Too Much?
So you have your new website and you heard that saying "drive traffic to your website by blogging". Does it work? Well sometimes but not all the time. Blogs are like websites, they need links to gain ranking to get good targeted traffic.
Targeted traffic is it important? Yes, it is. It is about as important as being #1 in the SERPs (search engine results pages). You see blogs and blog rolling can create such a mixture of diversity of topics. This in a sense will pull your website away from what it is relevant for. Also people that are targeted are actually looking for blue widgets, and not Aunt Selma's Fried Chicken recipe, unless she serves it on the blue widgets.
Creating many blogs, MySpace, Squidoo, and the like can be considered spam. Especially when you start creating more than one going to the same website! Plus just making them for links, this is considered artificial link gaining and can get your site penalized or filtered from the indices. Read our article about link building (link at the bottom of page). How much can be too much, and to blog or not to blog? Many people create blogs just to be creating links; this is when you shouldn't blog. Creating many blogs to artificially pump up your links is wrong and a no no with some SEs (search engines), the main SE that you should concern yourself with is Google™. We say Google because at this time it is the most used search engine. This is a violation of Google's Quality Guidelines to artificially create sites for link purposes, one to two blogs are ok, but still make sure the blog is on topic for relevancy. Even 2 blogs can be considered to much as a site only needs 1 blog.
Links from websites can be weighed more for gaining authority in the search engines. The main reason why is that it is harder to get a link from a website than a blog. Creating a few blogs is too easy and the search engines are wise to this, another reason not to blog this way. Blog links and comments seem to be downgraded somewhat on link benefit now.
Blogs Are Good to Gain Links
Ok, now it is going to seem like we are contradicting what was just stated. Yes, blogs are good when the content stays fresh and is good to read for your visitors it can gain more links. If you are creating a blog with original and good content then yeah, it is time to blog. Keeping your visitors interested is the ultimate goal of a blog. Even if the blog links are downgraded for link benefit regarding search engine ranking you can still gain potential traffic from your blog to your website.
You can also drive people to link to your regular website if you have good content. So adding content regularly helps both the visitors and your website, as they will come to see what is new and the SEs as they will come to see what is new.
Getting a Blog
Many people wonder how to get a blog. If you have your own website and hosting then usually you can upload a blog to the servers. If this is too difficult then you can get blogs from places like Word Press and Blogspot. These are free blogs but they are hosted on their servers. So essentially you are also helping those domains get more content. At Jezsta Web Productions we feel if you can get your own blog loaded up at your hosting as this is essentially better for your website and not someone else's.
Did you know Jezsta Web Productions can provide hosting? Jezsta's hosting packages also come with blog software! Everything is easy to do with Jezsta Web Productions! The hosting also comes with several optional forum programs.
Blog Comment Spam
Yeah, it happens. People will spam anything they can really. Spammers are always trying to gain links the easy way. Blog spam is the easiest way to do it. Blog spamming may give a temporary boost, but after a while the search engines will catch up to those that spam and the domains will get penalized. Yes, the domains are the website but once it has been marked it can take a domain a while to get back up. This is even after a new site has been loaded to the penalized domain.
So to Blog or Not to Blog
To blog is totally up to you. Blogging is a very good idea, but don't try and create so many just to be creating them for link purposes. The information you put on them could be useless to the visitors, and sometimes useless content drives useless visitors to your site. This is not what you want; remember your want the person to actually want to be at your site.
© 2007 Stacey Pettibone - Jezsta Web Productions
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