The original acronym ‘Blog’ stood for ‘Web Log’ and ‘personal ‘ or ‘documentary ‘ style blogging would suffice to define that genre as they are primarily catalogues of the life experiences of their author. There are many blogs today however that serve other functions. Although there are quite a few ‘artistic’ and ‘creative’ blogs that focus on collecting poetry and other forms of creative writing, the vast majority of personal blogs are in some sense documentaries.
What has evolved from a ‘documentary’ style, which usually would just mean an objective ‘reporting’ of current events or in some way an honest ‘review’, seems to be a definite movement towards using the blog platform to voice one’s opinions about the various life events that are no longer just ‘chronicled’. They can be scathing reviews! It seems the public loves drama and the more a writer can emphasize what he is saying whether positive or negative, it seems the more attention he will get – which is the whole idea!
There was a time when for Internet marketing, the blog was formatted or designed solely for the delight of search engine robots – oh and a vague nod to a few human readers. Although SEO (search engine optimization) has always preached ‘content is king’ and you have to assume they want readable and enjoyable for humans, the real focus seemed to be on the robots – the back-links, the keywords, various elements that only a robot could appreciate.
So marketing bloggers were instructed to pick meaningful keywords (relevant to their business and content) and build their articles/ blog posts around those themes. This it was/is said will make it easier for the search engines to index the site and know exactly what is there and which search terms would trigger them displaying your link to someone so that you might generate ‘targeted’ traffic. This still seems quite logical if you look at it that way. Particularly if your blog is apart from your business website you might want to stick with these concepts.
However if you had the insight to build your website on a blog platform like WordPress, then it doesn’t really matter what your blog post is about – people and robots are still going to be directed to your domain when you post ‘fresh content’ and it is re-indexing time. Hence there appears to be a trend going back to the documentary or personal journal style of blogging where people are talking about any number of interests that do not include their business. (remember this is ok if you are on the business’ website). Otherwise unless you are trying to grow a following as a writer, commentator or journalist, you probably want to stay focused on why you are blogging in the first place = TRAFFIC for your business.
