Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

I see this question often. People want to know which blog platform works best for SEO. That’s really a terrible question to ask for several reasons, the most important being that you might not actually be able to use the best SEO blog platform.

There are many blog platforms out there. Generally speaking, any blog platform that allows you to do the following is suitable for SEO (even if you have to install plug-ins to make it work):

• Create crawlable, indexable individual pages for each article
• Create crawlable, indexable tag pages
• Create crawlable, indexable category pages
• Create unique, keyword-rich article titles that are used in H1 (or equivalent), page URLs, and meta description
• Embed links anywhere in your blog post without having to click on some stupid graphic that pops up a form in a window

If you’re gasping in horror at the idea of creating DUPLICATE CONTENT (dunh, dunh, dunh!) get over it. The less you fuss over duplicate content, the better.

Still, if I had my druthers I’d druther that the tag and category pages looked a little different. It’s okay for a tag page to show just the linked title of the article, the author, and the posting date. Maybe include the meta description. It’s okay for the category page to show a little bit more, like the first paragraph or two of each article.

I don’t need monthly or weekly archives but I’ll take them as people usually do not link to them.

The bottom line here is you can use just about any blog platform to create the best blog for SEO. There is no such thing as an “SEO friendly” blog platform (because anything “SEO friendly” usually becomes “SEO toxic”).

But once you settle on which blog will be your best blog for SEO, you’re stuck because, frankly, most people who blog for SEO really, really seem to suck at blogging for SEO. The best SEO blog posts rarely come from the SEO community.

Why is that? Now, don’t get up on your high horse and say you’re too busy to blog about SEO. Truth be told, you probably write better for your SEO blog than for your client blogs — and THAT is the problem, boys and girls. Your best SEO blog posts cannot, should not, and must not be left for your SEO blogs. They don’t do your clients any good.

I read a lot of press releases, free distribution articles, and subscription blog articles and let me tell you, the vast majority of them are horribly written. Even assuming there is a fair amount of article spinning going on (either manually or through software), there are obviously human-written articles being pushed out to these networks for the sole purpose of building links.

People should not wonder at why the links seem so weak. After all, you have to attract links in order to pass value through your links, and a lot of SEOs devote as little time as possible to writing articles for their press release, free ezine archive, and blog network services. It shows, too.

You should sit down with your own personal blog and pick 25 articles on your favorite link-building networks and link to those articles. Do it out there where everyone can see what you’re linking to. Write passionate, bold, loving articles about those link-building articles that your associates in SEO have provided for you.

I guarantee you there isn’t an SEO in the business who would be willing to do that with his or her personal blog. That’s because all those free press releases, free ezine articles, and free blog posts are crap. They aren’t worth the money your clients are spending on them. If they were, real people would be linking to them.

So the best blog for SEO is the blog that selects and publishes only the best blog posts for SEO: real articles that are written from the heart by someone who finds the topic interesting. They set out with the goal of providing information or an opinion. It’s amazingly simple and easy to do. So why don’t more SEOs do that?

I see articles with broken links, malformed HTML formatting, incomprehensible expressions, and some of the oddest collections of links bundled together. Do these link building SEOs have no shame? Do they take no pride in what they do?

It’s easy enough to see that if you blast enough links out there onto the Web some of them will pass value. But think about the time you’re wasting to by creating crappy content no one in their right mind would link to. If you want to create value for your clients then you should create valuable content, even if the content’s only purpose is to link out to some Web site with appropriate anchor text.

That’s how you create the best blog posts for SEO. Think about it.

SEO Theory Blog Update

I’ve been asked whether there will be another “20 Hard Core SEO Tips” article on SEO Theory this year. If you’re not familiar with the topic, in 2007 (on a whim) I wrote up 20 Hard Core SEO Tips. The article proved to be monumentally popular.

Curious about whether I could do it again, last year I wrote 20 More Hard Core SEO Tips. While that article did not generate as much buzz as the first, it did receive a lot of traffic.

And this year (once again on October 16, as with the previous two articles) I will be publishing another 20 hard core tips article on SEO Theory. Please be sure to check it out and tell your friends about it.

UPDATE: Read Another 20 Hard Core SEO Tips on SEO Theory.