Search Engine Friendly Fallacy
In November, I posted on the blog at work about how sites are not naturally search engine friendly. And though I’ve likely said that something can be naturally search engine friendly, when I think through it, I just don’t think a site or a blog can be search engine friendly right out of the box. Aspects of the CMS or blog engine may aid the search engine friendliness, but there are still a dozen ways to write and post content and organize links in a way that negates what is “naturally” search engine friendly.
Jennifer Osborne, in her first of a five part series on how to sell a client on a blog strategy states, “In addition to it being an opportunity to talk to your client in a different tone than the rest of your site, it’s a very Search Engine friendly, Social Media friendly infrastructure.”
Blogs are not very search engine friendly by default. I suppose it is an accurate statement for a search marketer to say the infrastructures are, because they create and refine them so they are, but as a general statement to a client, it’s just plain wrong. WordPress, my blogging tool of choice is generally considered to be a search engine friendly infrastructure. But by default, it creates posts that look like this: ?p=123, instead of /keyword-rich-title/. I don’t recall exactly what it does with Titles and Meta Tags out of the box, but I know I don’t start a blog without first installing the All-in-One SEO Pack and the Dofollow plugins.
And does a blog have a social media friendly infrastructure? In my post on blog improvement tips, one of my priorities was to make sure there were buttons on this blog for submission of my posts to social media sites. These buttons aren’t there naturally. The option to comment is certainly social, and is turned on by default, but to truly make a blog social requires more than a comment form.
So if you’re a potential client to a marketing agency, or are thinking of building a blog on your own, blogs are not necessarily search engine friendly or social media friendly until they’re modified.
