Earlier this week Fiona wrote a post about who you are writing for and I thought I would follow up with a post about what you’re writing.
The point she was making was whether you should be writing blog posts for search engines or to engage with your active readers.
And there’s a relatively straight forward alternative question to this: Are you writing blog posts or news articles?
To begin with I’ll state my interpretations of each
Blog posts
Based on ideas around your business (or life for personal users) and your thoughts and comments on what’s happening in the news.
News articles
Based on factual information designed to engage and inform the reader about current or ongoing information (whether about the business directly or articles in the news that relate to your business).
Audience connections – blog posts
On a blog you will generally be posting to an active reader list – people who read what you have to say time and time again. You might get referrals by word or mouth (in this decade: social media) and them sometimes a post you write will perform really well on a particular topic in search engines (See how just one blog post by Flowerona about the UK Royal wedding bouquet received tens of thousands of hits, and resulted in the offer of a column for a floral magazine)
Though search engines are important to gain new subscribers (though the age old ‘word of mouth’ tactic is pretty good – i.e. ‘Share’ buttons) you are making connections with human beings and writing copy that is riveting and compelling. If your blog post is good people should want to share it and it’ll spread across social media platforms such as Twitter.
Audience connections - news articles
You may read or are linked to news articles by the BBC, the Telegraph and other news sites. Look at their tone and how they write. They’re connecting with the reader to inform them of what has/is happening.
It’s a good idea to keep factual information relating to your business where you are informing rather giving opinion in a separate news feed (generally integrated with your website). And this is where you can start putting your Search Engine hat on.
The tone of voice used for writing news articles that inform a reader is exactly the tone that is suitable to writing good search engine copy. They make use of repeating key note information and quotes to reiterate their point (see the correlation?). By still making a readable piece of copy you can entice searchers on to the news article that you have written and then link them off to a) more information, b) your contact details and c) (if you have one) your own comments on a separate blog. Please feel free to rearrange this order as you see fit.
Expanding the example – the Telegraph
As an illustrative example The Telegraph has news articles for informing their readers of current news and blogs for their editors so that they can give their own comments. There are separated to keep fact from opinion.
The cost of upkeep
Whether you are writing a blog post or a news article the same problem arises: you need to write frequently. To engage with your active readers of a blog then they’ll be wanting new content to come back to. To engage with search engines exactly the same applies. If there’s nothing new they’ll got bored and stop coming back.
) often starts out with a headline that bears no resemblence to what follows in the paragraph below. Writing for the web forces you to stay focused. If you want to get found for bespoke kitchens in Surrey; well then you need to make sure you use those words in what you’re writing. And so that it makes sense to the humans that are invariably going to read your website if your SEO ninja tricks pay off; then you need to make sure that the whole paragraph, or better still the whole page is around that theme too – just so that it makes sense…
