Pittsburgh SEO – SEM – SEA | Internet Marketing and Website Design | Blackball Online

Overcoming Blog Burnout

In my previous life I was a fanatical weight-lifter, and there was a saying; “you can train hard, and you can train long, but you can’t do both at the same time” (unless you were on steroids). But a bunch of us tried anyway and the body reacted, by doing of all things, “burning out.” So what does this have to do with blogging? Well, I’m seeing more and more of a similar thing, a lot of well designed business class blogs that have just burned out, nothing posted for months.

Unless your full-time position/job with an enterprise is as a Social Media articulator or reasonable facsimile there of, you will most certainly burn out and become very frustrated trying to come up with good quality blog posts day in and day out. Even if this is your full time job, it will be difficult.

I saw a post on a particular profession’s blog that went something like this “I have nothing to blog about, and I don’t know what to say” then the post went into a highly stylized “rant” about who knows what. I believe this individual was venting frustrations about not having anything to blog about. (Maybe that’s what I’m doing now.)

There’s more than a few blog gurus out there telling you to do this and do that to prevent blog burnout, but in a lot of cases it just comes down to time and I just can’t come up with anything of quality to say. Forcing the issue doesn’t make it any better.

Zenith’s tagline way-back-when was “Quality goes in before the name goes out.” The Zenith people said nothing about quantity, quality was job one.

I see blogging the same way, quality, not quantity. If a post doesn’t make it for a few weeks or even longer for one reason or another, so be it. I just want to make sure it’s as relevant as I can get it at that time when the post does go up.

At Blackball Online Marketing we offer Pittsburgh Internet Consulting for overcoming blog burnout. Option B is to have one of our writers fill in some of those topics from a different perspective. Click or Call.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/tribpm/s_624777.html (This post has been retired)

Above was a great article URL on the old Southside clock from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review - Trib PM edition - a little bit of Pittsburghana (if that is a word, kind of like Americana). Anyway, I thought I would break down the blog post name (Permalink) a little to help to clarify the conventions used to name blog posts and why they are important in the SEO for your site.

We want, ideally, for all our blog posts to rank in the search engines on their own. It lends to the credibility of our companies, our sites, and our posts directly. This is where the SEO comes in. In order to do that, the first thing the crawler sees is the blog post name i.e. the Permalink. Then the blog post title. Then the blog content itself. If anything blocks the crawler, it stops. The game is up and it only has that amount of information to go by. Take this fake post title for example:

http://www.blackballonline.com/?23456-ee.html

We've all seen links to blog posts like this above. The search engine is unable to crawl beyond the question mark (?) because special characters are not crawler friendly. So all the crawler sees is our site URL and no more. We've just blown a golden opportunity, and a lot of time to write a post nobody but the searcher inside our blog will ever see.

Back to the original post - http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/tribpm/s_624777.html

A breakdown of the Permalink (blog post name) above:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com -                            The URL
x -                                                                       a convention used by the Trib
pittsburghtrib -                                                     the name of the blog
news -                                                                 the category or tag the post is under
tribpm -                                                               the category or tag the post is under
s_624777.html -                                                  the filename

A note or two about the breakdown.
1.) news and tribpm could be tags or categories - I don't know the Trib's nomenclature for titling their blog posts.
2.) the filename s_624777.html - while this is fantastic for Google Blog Search  it says nothing about the post, or the keywords for that matter. When it comes to ranking this, where does Google index it? Under news obviously, but what kind of news? The search engines will have to search the content.

The moral of the story is: If we want Google to index our blog posts and rank for certain keywords, we should eliminate the guessing game and just create what are called pretty Permalinks and stick to these naming conventions. That's why we optimize them using SEO.