Just like how it helps individual writers connect with readers, blogs help businesses interact with clients in a more casual, personalized way. Business-to-business blogs help expound certain products or services without necessarily altering the tone of the message within product pages. But when they’re not optimized for search engines, their prospect clients may not easily find them.
Business people. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/44211617@N03/
Here are some common practices B2B blogs commit that could stunt progress on search engine visibility:
Some B2B blogs display full posts on homepage
Instead of posting an excerpt of each blog in the homepage, some B2B blogs display the full posts. This practice impacts two things. First, the individual page containing the post isn’t worth visiting because the reader would have read all of its contents in the homepage anyway. This could affect the bounce rate and likelihood for the post to be shared or linked to. Second, the blog homepage becomes much longer, depending on the typical length of each blog entry and on how many blogs the homepage is set to display. This means search engines might be spending longer time on homepage when they’re supposed to spend more time crawling inside pages.
Lack of keyword-rich titles
Some B2B blogs prefer to write titles of articles like the way newspapers write creatively. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is that not a lot of people may use those keyword or terms that they are using. Since many blog platforms automatically format the page title the same as the article title, the less prominent keywords are given more emphasis. As a result, search engine visibility for the blog entry gets compromised.
Some B2B blogs lack keyword-rich URLs
Certain blog platforms automatically align the blog post URL along with the blog title. However there are those that don’t support it. They are the blogs that use elaborate URL format, complicated string of parameters to display one simple blog entry.
blog/id?=2349912&type=display&cat=5
Compare that with a keyword-rich URL some blogs offer:
blog/best-practice-video-seo.html
Some B2B blogs allow link juice to leak
Many blogs are guilty of this mistake, this blog included. Link juice refers to the link popularity a page possesses based on quality of inbound links. Using archive categories (monthly or daily summary of blogs) allows precious link juice flows towards less important pages. By not allowing link juice to flow on these pages, a blog post retains its importance with respect to link popularity. There are ways to prevent diluting of link juice: applying nofollow to archive links or simply not displaying the monthly archives at all.
Some B2B blogs don’t optimize anchor text
I am not sure who writes the articles (a busy executive, a know-it-all CEO or some ghost writer) but it’s a common observation that B2B blogs don’t consider using a relevant anchor text (text used as hyperlink) when linking to another page within the blog. It’s not unusual to see “click here”, “more details” or other words irrelevant to the page it links to. Search engines place emphasis on anchor text as a signal that indicates relevance. If I want to optimize a page about best practice SEO, I’d rather use “best practice SEO” as an anchor text within a page that links to that best practice SEO article.
Some B2B blogs don’t address canonicalization issues
Some business blogs ignore the impact of canonicalization issue. The same page shows up whether it’s www.businessblog.com or businessblog.com or www.businessblog.com/index.html. Instead of consolidating the link popularity towards one version of the site, search engines and external sites that confer links don’t behave this way simply because they are allowed to choose different URL versions.
Some B2B blogs don’t link to internal pages
Some business blogs do not promote healthy internal linking structure through linking to other relevant posts within blog entries. If one blog talks about its corporate products or services it’s good to link to that product or service page. If the blog post talks about the recent awards received by a local business council, a link to the press release page about that award is a good practice. Of course it’s better to be more sensible and use a relevant anchor text when linking to internal pages.
Hopefully, we’ll see more B2B blogs think about what they are missing, implement these changes every time a new blog entry is published while aiming for better search engine visibility.
August 18th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
Elemer, you contradict yourself big-time in this post RE linking/not linking.
As a general rule of thumb, it is always a good idea to link, both internally and externally, and i’ll give you two good reasons why.
1: allowing link juice to leak
Your argument here is that by linking to older, possibly archived content, you are actually hurting the link-strength of your site. This is a flawed argument. The reason this is a flawed argument is due to the fact that, at some point, the site owner invested time to create the content in question. the content is most likely keyword rich, and as it is being used on a blog, probably is set up to capture long-tail traffic. If you apply a rel=nofollow tag to these archives, you are disassociating this content from the SERPS, effectively crippling your ability to capture the long-tail.
As a site owner, if you’ve spent the time writing backfill content it is best practice to ensure that the content is visible in search. Rel=nofollow means you set up a road-block for the crawlers meaning that the content will not be indexed. If your argument is that you are diluting link strength by linking to these pages (keeping them visible), then you are wrong. the link juice will stay under the domain, even if it is being drawn away from a specific page – the domain still prospers, especially if your are distributing your content (linkbait)correctly in order to generate quality backlinks.
2. If you don’t link externally
You will be penalized. It is unnatural for a site to have a large number of incoming links, and virtually no outgoing links. By hoarding linkjuice (pr) you’re setting yourself up for failure with the current algorithm changes in most modern SERPS – they recognize the sites and penalize them. The best idea is with regards to selectivley linking externally. Write content for a third party site, and then link to that content (with a quality anchor text link pointing back to your blog)..
Long story short, link internally at every chance you get, and don’t hoard your link juice.
August 18th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Thanks for your info Mike. When I wrote about the "nofollow" I was referring to doing so on pages that contain duplicate information. Examples are monthly blog archives which is a collection of blogs posted in a particular month. While it’s highly arguable that nobody looks for blogs based on dates (rather people look for specific topics), such information presented in archives is not unique and should therefore be ranked lower in order of importance than a unique blog entry. I’d rather wish to see my article rank higher for certain queries than the category where it belongs / is tagged. And for that reason I pointed out "leaking" link juice shifts the balance between important and less important pages.
I agree it’s unlikely that a large site with thousands of IBL decide not to link to external pages, but I don’t know why should sites who do so be penalized.
August 19th, 2010 at 11:29 am
Sure, i agree that users won’t be searching based on the date an article was published, but the idea that blocking those archives will actually help the site/page is still flawed. The links may determine the keyword association, but the on-page content contributes a higher weighted association. You most definitely want to nofollow duplicate content, as that also incurs a penalty in most SERPS, but the key question here is why you would create duplicate content in the first place as it is a no-win scenario (how many adsense scraper sites are actually profitable after the Caffeine update?)…
If you’re feeding your blog posts into google or yahoo news, the date aspect of the post will be fairly important to the user who is researching or looking to purchase on some specific topic/product. if you’re disassociating that content from the date links, then you further remove the content from relevance, making it that much harder to reach the end customer. Best practice here, as stated above, is to keep your content heavily linked internally; don’t forget that links are just one (increasingly smaller) aspect of rankings – your content and your optimization (meta, h1’s, urls ect) are increasingly weighted more with regards to rankings.
If a site with a high number of IBL’s chooses to hoard their PR, then the search engines will most likely choose to do a manual review (check out the Google manual review PDF – should be floating around somewhere). The likelihood of surviving a manual review looking specifically at this is low – remember that google is currently focusing on hubs, sites that are "centers" for both incoming and outgoing succeed far better than sites which only have incoming – ergo, a natural penalty.