Moving Blog Posts To Your Website - Essential
Written by Robert Bacal | 
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| Social Media Platforms - Blogging |
The ease of blogs to get content online quickly and without knowing how to code html has been a boon to many businesses out there. It's allowed non-technical people a hands-on opportunity to have a voice. However, there are a few problems with blogs that cause your excellent content to fade from view on the Internet.
Blogs were designed as journalling tools, so they are chronologically based out of the box. new material appears on the front page, and a front page should be kept reasonable short. In any event almost no visitors will scroll down past dozens or articles so your older posts are, in effect, lost. Many blogs also do not index material well so a visitor can see what's available quickly. Menus need to be kept short.
While you can tweek blog templates and software to address some of these issues, the end result is that an article published on a blog gets a big push in visibility, and then very few people visit. The surge rarely lasts more than a day or two.
In addition, while I have no documentation, I believe search engines treat blog posts differently than regular web site pages. Blogs are quickly searchable in Google, but it appears that, once again, they quickly disappear in the depths of the rest of the search results.
When you take your writing work seriously, that means the effective shelf life of your posts is exceedingly short.
Our Solution: Move Older Blog Posts To Web Pages
We are starting to move articles posted in our blogs to static web pages so we can try to make them more visible. About 99% of our total traffic on the net comes from our web pages, with only about 1% coming from blogs, so this makes sense. We believe moving material will also make the material more authoritative due to the way blogs have been used -- more as informal chatting, than actual serious writing.
We're still deciding whether we'll move articles and remove them from blogs, or simply make copies available in our web page formats. I suspect eventually all of our older posts will end up removed from our blogs, let's say about a month after originally appearing, and we'll automatically redirect visitors from the blog page to the web page.
Of course, to do that you have to have a web site, and have the skill to move from blog to web page, but after all, if you use blogs for businesses it's worth paying for expert help, or learning to do it yourself.
This IS a speculative strategy. I'll report back if I end up with good data. If you have low blog traffic, as we do, it's a no brainer, since even if it doesn't work, worst case scenario is that we'll lose only a tiny amount of traffic.
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