Quoting News in your Blog

Some blogs are just running excerpts from news articles. These are generally worthless for marketing and have negative SEO value. We’ve written about duplicate content before, so we won’t go into that here. But there are times when you want to use part of a news article in your posts.

The first issue is permission. You can use a certain amount of text under “fair use” but you can’t quote the entire article or a huge segment without reprint rights. Often reprint rights are accessible – you just contact the paper via their web site about reprint rights and specify your reason and that it’s for a business blog, etc.

However, under “fair use”, you could probably reasonably quote a couple of paragraphs without a problem. We’re not giving a professional rule of thumb or legal advice about the length of a quotation – fair use is vague in the law – intentionally – so they can go after people selectively rather than evenly. But personally this writer will quote a couple of paragraphs at a time without incident.

Assuming you’re going to do that, for maximum SEO (search engine optimization), quote the piece in the context of your own post, article, or blog entry – with at least 100-200 words before and after. Examples are [here], [here], and [here].

If there’s enough of a lead-in, the article will be more likely to get treated as unique by google, even with the quotation in it. That way you actually get seo value out of it. Plus, it’s bad form to just slap a quotation on your site with nothing else – because visitors see it as lowering the value of your site – there’s nothing there they couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. Best practice is put quotations in the context of you making your own set of points.

Originality is king. If you see something in the news you just have to use, write a short (less than 500 words) article that’s the article that *you* would have written for the NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, or whatever, and include the quotation section in the middle of it, at the appropriate point. It’s fine to even take an article in a completely different direction than the original writer, because that’s precisely the point – borrowing the quotation but using it in the context of your own purposes and direction. You don’t want to represent it out of context, but you’re entitled to do more than just mimic someone else’s article – again added value is what’s important – don’t make it a rip off of someone else’s piece, because then they just don’t need your site – they can go to the source. Remember, search engines make the big internet small.

Lastly, you could include just a link to another article, with a few comments, but that’s bad form. It sends people off site without good cause. Plus – just a link, by itself, can lower SEO (you’re giving away juice). Instead, put a link to the original article in the quotation source. Like this:

Mr. Elienberg wasn’t a Comcast employee, but a so-called independent contractor working for a separate company. This month, he sued both companies, for allegedly depriving him and other contractors of overtime pay and benefits by not considering them employees.The case highlights a perennial issue for employers that is gaining new prominence during the recession. Lawyers say employers are trying to avoid hiring full-time employees by tapping contractors, as workers seeking better pay and benefits turn to the courts. – [Wall Street Journal, Oct 19, 2009]

Besides, chances are the link is going to break at some point, when the source site overhauls their site, removes the article, or starts charging for it. Block quotes are nice, by the way: no need for quote marks or italics with a block quote, and it’s appropriate for quoting in extenso and for visually displaying the quotation in a more interesting way.

That’s it. Use quotations and links judiciously, be original, don’t duplicate other sites wholesale (it’s getting you nowhere and ruining your SEO), and don’t quote our of context, but do use visual styling, and do express your own ideas in your posts. Market Moose provides consulting on internet marketing strategy to small businesses.

You Mean You’re Not Blogging?

You’re throwing opportunities away. According to Digital Inspiration, Blogs rate higher on Google than Newspapers or Magazines. Why do you think most major news services have added blogs to their sites? They’re trying not to lose their audiences. Blogs capture web traffic. In fact, one acronym for BLOG is Better Listing On Google! Remember, most people don’t search by company name, unless they’re already your clients. You want to capture people looking at real estate issues, or whatever else your site is about.

It can be hard to believe, at first, that it helps. Someone asked, recently, “You mean people read blogs and then call you?” Yes, that’s one way. Blogs help search engines find and rank your site higher. You get high plusses for unique, original, relevant, and frequently updated content. People whose sites never change, start sinking in the rankings of key searches. You will come up in more searches (it’s not just about rankings), which means more people find your site when searching for relevant information and discussion. Eventually, a readership develops. If you rarely update your blog, of course, you’ll never experience these benefits. It’s like owning a neon sign and never turning on the power. It’s hard for people of my generation to believe that things work this way now, but they do. That’s why most major companies and organizations have turned to blogging, and often run a number of blogs that draw attention to their services.

I’m not technical!: Neither is blogging. Blogging is no harder. and not very different, than sending an e-mail. It’s type and save. For many people, blogging has not been tried and found too hard, it’s simply not been tried, because there’s not enough belief in increasing your business. But if that’s not you, it takes about 10 minutes a day for a consistent time to make an impact. What are you waiting for?

The Keys to Blogging Well are:
Consistency: Blog 10-minutes a day. If you absolutely can’t, then blog every other day. If every 3rd day is all you can do, it’s all you can do. But putting up a blog you intent to update once a month is just going to frustrate visitors who expect to see something new from you.
Relevancy: It’s all well and good to blog about your cats. But relevancy scores big with search engines and with clients. Blog about the local market, your industry, financial issues, advice for buyers/sellers/borrowers/homeowners. Blog what you think about, what you know, what’s on your mind and, if you do that consistently, you’ll attract other people who are thinking about it too.
Uniqueness: Don’t copy and paste other people’s content into your blog. For one thing, that’s stealing, and other businesses tend to take a dim view. For another, search engines penalize you for duplicate content, so you’re just wasting space and making it worse. You don’t have to be hemingway to write a paragraph on what’s frustrating about the market right now, or answering a question that you were asked today, or explaining why a certain kind of mortgage is better than another, or discussing whether it’s a good time to buy, a good time to sell, or both. Maybe you write just to give hope. But for goodness sake, if you can answer a question on the telephone, you can write down what you said on your blog. Work it!

That’s it. You can google search business blogs, blog growth, blogs and search engine rankings, and any number of other phrases to see what’s going on. It’s like health – it’s not about whether we know what’s good for us; it’s whether we have the will. In fact, this is about the health of your business.