YesorNo-Cover

Posting your blog content is great for web traffic and SEO, but if no one is coming to your site, how useful is that content? Could a blog post be doing more if it was more readily available to a larger audience than the one that goes to your website and sticks around long enough to find and read your blog? Social media does a lot of the heavy lifting, but reaching those that want to read and are looking for blog content isn’t always as easy as tweeting your blog and posting it on your Facebook page.

Blog sharing sites like Medium and StumbleUpon are on the rise and that’s awesome for getting more readers exposed to content, but is it hurting you in the end? When people see your blog on a site like Medium, are they going to come to your site for more?

If you know what’s good for you, you or someone else is writing blogs for your website or company. Generating content for your site is one of the best ways to increase traffic and shows your audience that not only do you know what you’re talking about, you’re a resource for news, information and other content that audiences are interested in reading about.

Where is the line between generating traffic and oversharing? Could posting your blog on multiple sites be hurting SEO and driving traffic away from your website to third party sites? I did some digging and found some pretty interesting results. Nothing I found is definitive to either side of this thinking, but it is important to note these results when looking at the possibilities for your own blog strategy.

Post It:

When you want to find out about something, you more than likely are going to Google it. When I want to read about SEO or email newsletters, I rarely go straight to one professional website to read up, I will go to sites with a wealth of information that I can look through and decide what is relevant to me. Posting your blog with tags on more popular sites gets you in front of people that probably didn’t know you or would ever search for you from Google. This exchange of information all in one place puts you in front of readers looking to read about your topic specifically

Alter It:

Posting everywhere and anywhere could actually be really damaging to your blog and your SEO. When reposting, I try to be careful about where that content is going to end up. Consistently posting to third party sites will pull search results to their website instead of yours. One way to avoid this is by altering your content.

  • Vary the title: Altering the content is your best bet if you are republishing content and concerned for your overall SEO advantage. Think outside of what you know about your topic and industry. Avoid overly technical blog titles and think like the person with less knowledge looking to find answers to the question or issue you’re solving with your content.
  • Aggregate your content: If you are blogging consistently you are more than likely generating a lot of content on a few topics. Pull these blogs together and alter the post to frankenstein a few blogs into one information filled blog post. You’ve already done the hard work by writing these blogs in the first place. Take a look at your old content and see how some posts could fit together for a longer, more in-depth blog post that you can post and link back to the original blogs on your page.

There are many different sites to post your content, not all of them appropriate for you and your industry. Be aware of where you put content and pay attention to the channels that bring people back for more, that’s the goal in reposting blog content so you should keep an eye on what’s working. In the end, having blog content on your site and your site alone is good for your SEO and generating content available only to people through your site, but reposting helps spread that content around. Refurbishing your content is a happy medium between the two and doesn’t take much additional effort. Consider both sides when it comes to your blog and the overall health of your website and decide what’s best for you.

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