To be straight foward about the purpose of this post, we've been stuck at #1 on page 2 for "interactive agency" for a couple of weeks now, and we're hoping this post will put us over the edge onto page one. At the same time, this post will also explain a little bit about blogging for SEO credit, different ways it can benefit you, and dispel some of the rumors about its overall value to your search rankings. Now for an obligatory interactive agency reference...

Many so called "experts" will pump potential clients up on blogging, and how blogging by itself will put you on page one for all sorts of things. While there is some truth to this, specifically for long tail keyword strings, the real moneymakers are short tail strings like interactive agency, and you just aren't going to get onto page one without a whole host of off-site SEO techniques.

It's generally easy to get ranked for long tail strings because nobody is actively optimizing for them. Simply put, if less than say 50 searches are being done a month for a particular keyword, then it's normally not worthwhile to actively optimize. ROI is important, and unless one conversion is worth hundreds or thousands, effort is better spent elsewhere on high volume terms.

This is where blogging can come into play. If you title your post and write your article with strategic use of the keyword string you wish to optimize, you can boost your on-site search credit while getting ranked for a long tail string. Obviously in this post we are actually targeting a short tail, but we are doing quite a bit of off-site for "interactive agency" and need every bit of competitive edge we can muster.

An example of this at work would be our post titled "Why hire us for SEO." If you Google that string, you will see us at #1. In the four months following that post being indexed at #1, we have received an average of 12 visits a month from that keyword. It's highly targeted to a specific niche, but has only led to one sale, versus one of our sister sites being ranked #5 for "SEO Nashville" and receiving 200+ visits per month. That site has generated four new clients in just the last month.

To summarize, blogging can be very important for overall freshness of content on your website without forcing you to change your core content. If you utilize a dynamic module which pulls in your blog title and intro text onto your homepage (or another page you are actively optimizing) you have a sneaky way to boost your keyword density and title tags with less risk of a keyword stuffing penalty.

If you notice, "interactive agency" was worked in the first paragraph twice, and only three times throughout the rest of this post. After two more posts, this one will no longer be featured, however the title and intro paragraph will still be pulled into the homepage. We will continue to get credit for those keyword mentions until the post is either deleted, or no longer needed.

All this is to say, don't fall into the trap of thinking all you need to do is blog and you'll rank highly. It's an ancillary piece to a full SEO campaign and--while important--is not the "be all, end all" that some try to represent. If you have any questions about search optimization, please don't hesitate to call. We will give you the straight scoop on how it all works, and show why you should choose us for your SEO company.