SEO Internet Marketing Tip: Write articles, not blogs

Posted on September 02, 2009 by Stephan Wiedner, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.

You want to publish content to the web in order to get more customers. What’s a better internet marketing solution? Articles (i.e. a standard informational website) or a blog? There are some advantages to a blog but articles are the way to go when it comes to SEO and getting traffic to your content 6 months, 2 years, or even 5 years from now.

Before I dive into the analysis of why writing articles is better than writing blog posts, there are two SEO rules all coaches and working professional need to know to market on the Internet.

1. Aim to please the human reader, not the search engine spiders. Trying to ‘game’ the search engines can only provide short-term benefits because the algorithms for providing the best search results are constantly changing and becoming more sophisticated. And as time goes on, the engines will provide more precisely what humans want.
2. Google wants to provide timeless information. The best SEO content will be as valuable 5 or 10 years from now as it is the day it is published.

Articles are more reliable sources of information than blogs

Before the days of the internet (remember those days?) there were 3 main ways of disseminating information – 1) books, 2) newspapers, 3) word-of-mouth. On a scale of reliability, books were considered the most reliable, word-of-mouth the least, and newspapers fell somewhere in between.

It’s crazy to think that we used to dust off the old 28-volume encyclopedia if we wanted to research how butterflies grow, the cause of diabetes, or why volcanoes erupt. As infrequently as your copy of the encyclopedia was published, it was considered a trusted source because a good amount of effort was put into writing each of the encyclopedia ‘articles’.

After books, newspapers were (and are) considered less reliable because it is published so frequently and quickly. The shelf-life of a newspaper is usually 24 hours and the information presented in it is not as in-depth as books. Nor is it supposed to be. That’s why it’s called the news.

Next comes word-of-mouth. Depending on the proximity of the communicator to the newsworthy event, word-of-mouth can have a varying degree of reliability. But I would argue that most word-of-mouth communication is 2nd, 3rd, or 4th-hand information and as a result, not reliable at all. With each passing of the message from one person to the next, it gets slightly miscommunicated and increasingly inaccurate. You’ve probably tried this with a group of people who whisper a message from one person to the next. What started as “SEO is a good long-term strategy” gets turned into “The CEO plans to retire because of a lung tragedy.”

The point of all this is that books, newspapers, and word-of-mouth have electronic equivalents now. Books can be roughly equated to websites, newspapers to blogs, and word-of-mouth to micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter).

Books == websites / articles
Newspapers == blogs
Word-of-mouth == micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter)

Similar to its non-digital predecessors, more time and effort goes into articles; therefore, Google and other search engines consider articles more reliable sources of timeless information. And if Google likes it, your potential customers will find it.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule but if you do a Google search for “why do volcanoes erupt”, most of the search results will be websites, not blog posts. And you definitely won’t get any Twitter tweets.

Article-based websites are content-focused; Blogs are time-focused

To further emphasize the analogy I made between old forms of communication and their digital equivalents, consider the structure in which the content is published. Websites are clearly organized around the content. For example, an automobile website might have the sub-headers “sedans”, “hatchbacks”, “trucks”, “SUVs”, and “minivans”. You don’t have to think too much to figure out what kind of content you’ll find under each category.

Meanwhile, a blog’s most prominent navigation takes you to the blog archives that groups articles based on the month in which they were written. For example, you’ll commonly find links that look like this on a blog:

Archives
November 2009 (3 posts)
October 2009 (9 posts)
September 2009 (6 posts)
August 2009 (14 posts)

Also, blog posts are presented in the order in which they were published and the most recent posts get all the attention. Once a blog post has been replaced by 3 or 4 newer ones, it’s old news. It gets lost in the mix and forgotten. Nobody cares about old blog posts and because Google’s algorithms are trying to emulate the value we as humans put on content (remember rule #1 above), Google doesn’t care about them either.

And if Google doesn’t care about your blog posts, the next time your ideal client searches for content that you’ve written about, your competition will be on the first page of the search results and you will be on the 20th page. That’s not good Internet marketing.

The benefits of Blogs: customer retention and easy content creation

Even though blogs are less likely to get you search engine traffic, blogs are not totally useless. If you are a coach or any other type of service professional working from home trying to get clients, writing a blog serves two main purposes.

1. It can be used as a “mental dump” to make a first pass at putting your thoughts and observations into words. A blog is good for avoiding writing blocks. Over time, bloggers often use their posts as a great starting point for a book or ebook. They organize their posts into groups of similar content which then become chapters in their book.
2. Blogs are useful to engage and build a more personal relationship with your potential customers. Before someone hires you, they want to know about your expertise (displayed in articles) but they may also want to know about your personal interests and likes. They may want to know that you volunteer for the local soup kitchen and that you love to walk your dog in the forest.

In summary, articles are considered more reliable and timeless than blogs. If you want more clients by having long-term traffic sent to you from Google and other search engines, write quality articles that people will want to read years from now.