Does It Matter How You Achieve The Original Content Goal?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

I’ve seen companies taking SEO into their hands and doing some pretty strange things, but it’s important as an search engine optimization professional to keep an open mind and to try to understand a company’s goals before you start criticizing their strategy. Just because things don’t seem to make sense, there may be legitimate reasons for doing them a certain way.

We know that updating your website with original content is a necessary thing. There are several ways to accomplish that goal. First, and one of the most popular ways of updating a website today, is to put a blog on it. If you blog every day then you’ll get original and unique content on your website every day. That invites the search engines to crawl your site more often and give you more pages to rank in the indexes. That’s one way. It’s not the only way.

Recently, a client came to me with a new website and a blog that they had put off site in order to promote the main website they wanted to drive traffic to. That can sometimes be a useful strategy, but I don’t always recommend it. In this client’s case, I thought it was a bad idea initially because I saw no plan to include original content on the main static website. However, there was a page on the site for articles and even though there was only one article link on that page, there was a plan to update that page weekly with a new article. The question is, is that a viable strategy.

Yes, I think it is. Particularly if there is a moderate amount of competition in your niche, but not overwhelming. The article page will serve to keep fresh new original content on your website. Granted, it isn’t daily updates, but weekly can be effective if the content is good. The blog, since it is on its own domain name, can rank according to its own merits and serve to filter traffic through to the main website. Not only can it drive traffic, but it can also build a fair amount of inbound links. I would not, however, rely on the blog alone to build links. I would have another link building strategy in the works to supplement the blog.

Keep in mind that there is more than one way to accomplish an optimization goal. The important thing is to feed the robots while providing your human visitors with great content.