Spiders, Crawlers, Robots, and Bots — Why Blogging Matters

Blogging matters most when you are selling products or services.

Certainly, some people blog for pleasure, perhaps to post photos of their world travels, share tips about gardening, or highlight favorite recipes. It’s fun, recreational, and educational.

However, business blogging is a different animal altogether. This type of blogging harnesses the power of the internet and requires technical know-how in addition to storytelling skillsets and marketing abilities.

In other words, a business blogger is trained in the art and science of feeding search engines and drawing traffic to your site, while at the same time weaving compelling (and often beautiful) narratives around your brand.

 

Blogging Matters

Spiders, crawlers, robots, and bots — an explainer on what they are, what they do, and how they challenge business bloggers to create fresh, compelling, and well-optimized online content.

Blogging Matters Because It Can Impact Your Bottom Line

Your website and your blog are the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal. Populating both with keyword-rich, optimized content is absolutely crucial.

Why?

Well, the simple answer is that business bloggers aren’t just writing for humans. We write for search engines, too. This means that we must know how to feed search engines in order to draw traffic to our customers’ sites. This isn’t a stream-of-consciousness type of blogging. Not at all. It’s a blend of creative wordsmithing and SEO designed to bring attention to your website, and thus, your goods and services.

What is Optimization?

Blogging Matters

Search engine optimation — SEO

Every single search engine — Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, Brave, etc. — has programs and software that automate the search for online “news.” And yes, your blog content is considered “news” as long as it is properly optimized (meaning search engine friendly) and offers fresh, compelling, and original content.

Enter the spiders, crawlers, robots, and bots. In a sense, they are a business blogger’s audience just as much as the customers we endeavor to reach. These programmed, automated “news seekers” quickly locate, scale, catalog, and index sites. My job is to “feed” them through optimization tactics.

Read about Google crawlers here.

Read about Googlebots here.

Why You Might Need Blogging Help

Below is a condensed explainer about the basics of search engine optimization — or SEO — best practices. You have to pay close attention to:

  • SEO title and title width
  • Keyphrases and keyphrase density in the slug, in the introduction, in the content itself, in the SEO title, and in subheadings as well
  • Consistently choosing a new keyphrase for each page and post
  • Meta description (and length)
  • Images and image keyphrase
  • Text length
  • Outbound links
  • Inbound links

Of course, there’s more, like trackbacks (automated notifications you send to other blogs when you refer to those blogs in your post) and pingbacks (when you link to other’s content and your software sends a pingback “comment” on your blog). There are also ways to measure your reach. For instance, Hubspot has great tools and metrics, and Wincher by Yoast has a great keyphrase performance tracker.

No, you don’t have to be an IT engineer to grasp all the nuances (and believe me, even IT engineers need primers and tutorials on effective blogging). Certainly, self-directed study goes a long way. But if you feel overwhelmed or simply don’t have the time to become a blogging genius, ask for help. There are many businesses, including mine, that can get your website sizzling and your blog working as hard as you do!

Let’s Connect and Discuss Why Blogging Matters to You!

Email me at melaniesaxton@icloud.com, and we’ll talk about your blogging needs and goals. I can’t overemphasize how important blogging is to your business!