The Importance of a Blog Footer

Karen,

For whatever it's worth, I give you top marks for SEO knowledge and creatively trying to leverage that knowledge with your footer.

But putting a footer at the end of every blog will quickly eliminate any "pull marketing" appeal your blogs have for consumers. I understand the line of thought that it may help consumers find you better via search results, but I wager it will be a turn off to many more.

I'm sorry for being a buzz-kill - I just wanted to share my impression.

Karen,

I think your posts are wonderful and full of so much information.  I would like to achieve good search engine placement and look forward to your hints to meet that goal.

Thanks,

Fran

I can understand the buzzkill comment.  That is the pull of the blog, the lack of in your face advertising.  However, the power of SEO is what gets in the consumer in the first place.  It would be quite interesting to theorize the equilibrium between enough footers to grab google and not too many to turn off the consumers it gives to us....

The challenge of a different footer everytime is fun.  But just as daunting to me as keyword rich text when I already have a tough time writing.

Karen,

Thanks again for your help. It is very easy to forget when writing a blog that the search engines will be pooring over it looking for relavancy.

Changes will have to be made.

I can tell you this with conviction - If you are blogging on the FREE Wordpress platform (www.wordpress.com) - they would consider your footer above as spam. You wouldn't hear anything about it unless people reported it to them - happened to me - very similar to yours.

The folks at wordpress are polite - referring you to the guidlines - but insistent to lose the promo. 

This is a tough one, Footers are pretty standard, along with properly named categories.  Take Google official Blog, it has categories pasted all over with Google on every link.  That's pretty spammy.  However, they don not have footers.

If you footer is genuine in an attempt to inform not just toss in keywords then I don't see problem. The rule of thumb is if it's good for people it's good for Google. 

I would say the footer is better suited in aforum than in your blog, only because your blog has that information already, while a forum would may not.  As with all things Internet, error on the side of caution and courtesy.

Hi there,

Thanks for the great information.  Yet sorry to say I'm still confused about the whole thing...a good thing or not?