Cameron Olthuis

I’ve been seeing it more and more lately, creating a blog soley to increase the search engine rankings for a website. This is a great example of blogging for the wrong reasons.

In this post on the High Rankings Forum someone stated the following…

..the reason for me to have a blog on is to improve my rankings (on the bottom line) i dont think it has to do anything with what my site is about (correct me if im wrong)

a few posts later the same individual replied…

and i heard that blogs and rss are the hot stuff regarding seo.

I think most people fail to realize that you shouldn’t be adding to your website just for seo purposes. This goes for anything, not just blogs. If it isn’t in the best interest of your site visitors then forget about it!

So what are the right reasons?

I can think of a lot of great reasons why someone (or a company) should have a blog, but the most important is for the purpose of providing well written, unique content that can’t be found anywhere else. Do you have a valuable opinion on one or many subjects? Do you want to keep in touch with friends and family? Are you an authoritive individual in a certain industry? These are just a few of many great reasons to start a blog. Personally I’ve recently started my own blog to keep family and friends updated on my family and also because I have a strong opinion in my area of expertise (Internet Marketing) that I’d like to share.

If you want to start a blog make sure it’s for the right reasons. If you put your visitors first the search engines (and traffic) will follow. Blogging and RSS are not the hot things in seo; lots of well written, unique, and powerful content is. Remember, if it doesn’t add value to your visitors then don’t do it.