I once wrote an article titled Blogs or Articles. That article was a discussion on whether people should concentrate more on either having articles or a blog on their site. I’ve always advocated businesses add a blog to their websites to help them gain prominence on search engines. I still believe that’s true.

Gisela Giardino via Compfight

Yet, in my humble opinion, the truth is that you also need to have specific types of articles on your main business site since they serve very different purposes. In this post I’m only going to talk about why you need those articles.

Let’s say that on your website you teach people how to play poker. On your main page, you’ve optimized yourself using good SEO techniques (hopefully) that tell everyone what you do and which types of games you teach. You have your title tag set well, all the proper H-whatever tags in place and you’ve made sure to match your first page’s content to what you say you do in the title tag. Pat yourself on the back; that’s a very good start. 🙂

Something that search engines love is what’s known as “anchor tags”. This is when the keyword or keyword phrases you’re trying to hype are linking to another place that helps your promotional activity. If it’s within your own website it works even better. It shows that not only do you value your keyword or keyword phrases, but you’re there to enhance everyone’s knowledge and show your expertise in those areas.

I’ve read all the noise about anchor tags and Google supposedly not liking them anymore; I addressed that along with other bad SEO advice in the past. Search engines don’t like being gamed by a lot of trickery, but they’re certainly looking to help you get the word out on what it is you do for business.

On your first page, one of the things you indicated is that you coach people on how to play no limit hold-em poker. Hopefully you have a link highlighting that keyword phrase that, if clicked, takes people to a page or article on that style of game. You could link to a blog post you’ve written about it and it certainly won’t hurt, but it works better if you have an article about it somewhere on your own site.

On your individual topic page you’ll have a new title tag, new description tags and new keyword tags, and you have the opportunity to highlight what and how you’re going to teach this type of poker. Doing this helps move you up the ladder on search engines because you’re letting them know that you didn’t just throw in a term and move on. Instead, you’re showing then you know what you’re talking about by writing an article that flows well, isn’t spam, and offers value to others. Remember, it’s always about value in their eyes.

Not only that but the article remains static, which means it’ll always be there in a prominent spot. As much as I love blogging, I recognize how hard it is to get people to look back at newly promoted content that’s more than a couple of years old, even if it’s still great stuff. Having a page where you link to specific articles and then having articles on your page that help you describe what it you do while showing your expertise, those articles always look fresh to your visitors and it certainly doesn’t hurt your SEO process.

If you did that for all the different types of poker you taught, then backed up your entire page by writing a blog and adding more articles on your niche topics, which will always have new content, search engines will love you and you’ll be able to compete with anyone.

For a bit of proof, let me tell you about my main business site. For those of you who don’t know ( and as a refresher to those of you who do), I’m a health care finance consultant by trade and my specialty is something called a “charge master“. If you look up “charge master consulting” on DuckDuckGo, you’ll find me in the #1 position. If you look me up on Google I’m in the #3 position (I need to mention that sometimes it depends on where you are as to whether you get the same results as I’m getting; no matter where you are, I should at least be in the top 10), and one of those sites ahead of me is a job site.

That’s because not only do I mention it on the first page of my site, but I have 3 articles on my articles page talking about charge master, I have them all linking to each other, and I’ve written a high number of articles on the subject on my blog over the years. I’ve been in the top 10 for 15 years, and there’s a lot more competition nowadays. The difference is that I continue writing about it and I have specific articles on my website showing my proficiency on the subject.

Of course you can always write articles and put them on other sites to help drive traffic to your site but it’s more important to boost your own site first. If it’s all done well you won’t need to post articles anywhere else.

This is how I see it’s worked for me. What thoughts do you have?