With all the talk about social media these days, you don’t hear a lot about blogs anymore and the blogosphere has 
That doesn’t means that blogs have disappeared or will anytime soon. A new report from the Internet marketing firm eMarketer tells us at least half of all the people that get information on the Web still read blogs and 12% of Internet users in the United States have updated a blog in the last month.
What does all that mean? Well, it’s clear that search engine optimization techniques using blogs as their vehicle will never really go away for several reasons including:
- The fact that social media doesn’t directly affect page ranking. Sure, you can get traffic to your site from places like Twitter and Facebook, but you need the keywords and links that Google searches for page ranking and that doesn’t happen with social media platforms. Losing blogs or some form of longer content restricts the results you’ll get from any Internet marketing campaign.
- Blogs tell the whole story. Remember you’ve only got 140 characters to describe what you need to on Twitter. That means you should point those snippets somewhere if you want your tweets to have some impact. In short, social media works well as a beacon pointing to where you want readers and prospective customers to go. It’s the means not the end. That’s still the domain of the blog and other forms of longer content.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose
The report also stresses a very good point you already know if you pay attention to the Internet, namely that blogs will continue to change and by 2014, 60% of Internet users will be reading some kind of blog. Remember that’s some kind of blog because blogging has always meant something different to different people and as they morph, the trend toward more and more people reading them will continue.
Here is another great point. As blogs evolve, people may be reading something they might not even consider a blog in the more traditional sense. That could push the positive numbers higher so even more people are reading and involved with blogs.
It all comes back to content in the end. Always does and more than likely always will. Blogs will be part of the internet landscape for good because blogs, in all their different forms, have consistently been part of what drives the Internet forward. Putting a different kind of fuel in your car doesn’t change the fact you still need wheels to drive it.
Every time some new way of spreading information across the Internet comes out that has the potential to reach more people quickly, the death knoll sounds for blogs. That’s just the people talking who don’t understand content and blogs will constantly be evolving and people will always have more to say and a product or service to sell that demands more than 140 characters to get the point across.
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