Blogging is the New Link Building

Link building has been the most common form of search engine optimization for the past several years. In fact, many companies that perform search engine optimization services will focus on link building because it is one of the best ways to move up the rankings on search engines. This has changed dramatically over the past year, especially in the past month with Panda and the Penguin Google algorithm updates.

Simple Backlink Strategies Don’t Work

Penguin penalizes spammy backlinks and Panda is designed to downgrade websites with poor content that is either spun, keyword stuffed, or just obviously built for SEO and not for genuine content. Before Panda, webmasters and SEO’s could spam articles that were poorly written, and use programs like article marketing robot to generate thousands of article submission backlinks.
Trellis has adapted its search engine optimization focus to on page SEO and quality content creation combined with only high quality link building services. Trellis believes that the trend towards penalizing weak backlinks and bad content will continue, and having a good site with fresh and updated content is the best way to safeguard against this. Although this strategy may take longer to build a strong effect on a websites rankings, it is a much better strategy for the long term growth of a website. An older article by Search Engine Land seems to agree that blogging is a secret weapon underutilized by most small businesses.
Relying on backlinks is not a full proof way to grow your online presence, because the websites you get links from to may come and go, thus building up your own website and content is a much better way to get more long term traffic to your site.
If you are a furniture store that wants to get ranked for used furniture, writing a post titled “Used Furniture” could work, but writing something a little more creative may actually benefit you more in the long run. Writing a post such as “Why Used Furniture Can Make Your Home More Inviting” is something that is much more likely to catch someone’s eye if it is written well. You could easily write a post about how used furniture is a growing industry in these tough economic times, and Google will not consider that spam or poorly written content.
Trying to write blog posts using the exact same keyword you are ranking for may work, but for the sake of building a good website with long term value, putting part of the keywords in your titles as blog posts or writing about the topics indirectly may serve better. Additionally, this will allow you write many posts that are all somewhat related to the keywords you are looking to rank for, and you will not come across as someone trying to write just for SEO content.

Blogging Helps Diversify Your Content

Blogging is the most useful tool when it comes to building strong content on your website because you are not limited to just what your company has to offer in terms of services and products. Of course adding new content pages and drop-downs to your site is essential to building a quality website, but building a website with a blog has never been more important than it is today. That is why content management systems with built in blogs such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are taking over, because anyone can start a blog with little effort and work.
Regardless of what you choose to write about, having freshly updated content will also help you get quality backlinks. Trying to spam links and hunt down links is not an effective strategy if your website is lacking quality content. Google wants good backlinks that are relevant to your business, and make sense for your website to have. Having a poor website with a lot of links pointing to it, will not make sense to Google because it doesn’t deserve to get that much recognition on the web, thus it is not a full proof strategy and will surely be penalized more and more throughout the coming years.
When I titled the post “Blogging is the New Backlinking,” I meant that blogging is the best way to generate quality backlinks because having a lot of content on your website will attract visitors and attention to your site. This will eventually cause people to organically link to your blog posts or website, without you even having to go hunt down websites for quality or low quality links. If you are looking to improve your search engine optimization skills, you may find that it is really your writing and creative writing skills that you need to improve upon. Having the ability to produce quality content quickly and effectively is what is going to become the most important aspect of SEO moving forward into 2013. Additionally, if you have the ability to produce info graphics, this will become a more relevant and useful skill for building quality and share worthy content because of how visual human beings are. Most people would rather see an image that tells a story than read an entire page.