Blog Posts Rank Poorly for Book Promotion
I'm not so crazy about blogs for book promotion, at least not compared to book excerpts. Blogs might be the best way to promote political or journalistic books, and they can help with fiction if they are popular enough. Unfortunately, full throttle blogging requires the blogger to become part of the blogosphere, and can force you into a policing role on your own blog to combat comment farmers and whackos. I have a couple of blogs bookmarked that I remember to look at once a month or so, sometimes I get interested in a new blog and follow it every day for a week, but blogging just isn't in my soul.
However, my problem with blogs for book promotion and content management in general extend beyond my personal lack of interest in the daily give and take. I've observed over time on my own site that older blog posts just don't draw search engine traffic the way static pages do. The most popular blog posts on my site rank down don't even make my top 50 most popular pages, and probably average down around five page views a day each. I think there are two structural reasons for this that are inherent to blogging.
First, regular readers who want to be nice and link to one of my posts generally link the main page of the blog rather than the post itself, which is save under a separate file name. This means that the blogger ends up with a bunch on contextually irrelevant links to the main blog page, unless the blog is so tightly focused that every post is essentially on the same subject. The individual posts, without any incoming links, are not judged that important by the search engines, which may even hold the dating against them in some instances. The posts also lack structured links from related static pages on the same site, unless you go to the trouble of creating them manually, after the fact.
Second, blog file names, with most blogging software, end up being pretty much the same as the page title, though truncated if too long. While an on-target page title is critical to getting the right search engine traffic, I suspect that a dead-nuts file name ends up hurting the page through its specificity. Take the title of this post, Blog Posts Rank Poorly for Book Promotion, the first four words of which are bound to show up in the file name. Now put yourself in the search engine algo's place. The algo gets a query like, "Do Blog Posts Rank Well in Search Engines" and it thinks, "Gee, I've got this nice website I can send this person to where the guy wrote something about blogs, and a bunch of the words are in the page title, but wait.. the file name is awfully specific about rank poorly rather than rank well, and if the author thought that fact was so important he had to embed it in the file name, it's probably not a good match for the query."
Is that really how a search engine algo sees the world? I doubt it, but when I'm searching online and see my own blog posts coming up in the results, it seems to be for much tighter matches on titles (and therefore file names) than with matches for my regular pages. So why do I keep blogging if I believe I'd get better results posting the same content in structured pages like I treat book excerpts? Just a bad habit, I guess, but it does get me writing more, without worrying too much about accuracy:-)
However, my problem with blogs for book promotion and content management in general extend beyond my personal lack of interest in the daily give and take. I've observed over time on my own site that older blog posts just don't draw search engine traffic the way static pages do. The most popular blog posts on my site rank down don't even make my top 50 most popular pages, and probably average down around five page views a day each. I think there are two structural reasons for this that are inherent to blogging.
First, regular readers who want to be nice and link to one of my posts generally link the main page of the blog rather than the post itself, which is save under a separate file name. This means that the blogger ends up with a bunch on contextually irrelevant links to the main blog page, unless the blog is so tightly focused that every post is essentially on the same subject. The individual posts, without any incoming links, are not judged that important by the search engines, which may even hold the dating against them in some instances. The posts also lack structured links from related static pages on the same site, unless you go to the trouble of creating them manually, after the fact.
Second, blog file names, with most blogging software, end up being pretty much the same as the page title, though truncated if too long. While an on-target page title is critical to getting the right search engine traffic, I suspect that a dead-nuts file name ends up hurting the page through its specificity. Take the title of this post, Blog Posts Rank Poorly for Book Promotion, the first four words of which are bound to show up in the file name. Now put yourself in the search engine algo's place. The algo gets a query like, "Do Blog Posts Rank Well in Search Engines" and it thinks, "Gee, I've got this nice website I can send this person to where the guy wrote something about blogs, and a bunch of the words are in the page title, but wait.. the file name is awfully specific about rank poorly rather than rank well, and if the author thought that fact was so important he had to embed it in the file name, it's probably not a good match for the query."
Is that really how a search engine algo sees the world? I doubt it, but when I'm searching online and see my own blog posts coming up in the results, it seems to be for much tighter matches on titles (and therefore file names) than with matches for my regular pages. So why do I keep blogging if I believe I'd get better results posting the same content in structured pages like I treat book excerpts? Just a bad habit, I guess, but it does get me writing more, without worrying too much about accuracy:-)
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home