It is very common for crypto and blockchain companies to publish content on Medium from time to time. Many go a step further and publish their company’s blog entirely on Medium. While the intellectual property rights are retained by the company, publishing a blog on Medium does not strengthen the SEO of the company’s website. In fact, the SEO power of the content is harnessed entirely by Medium, leaving the company at a disadvantage.
Some crypto companies choose to link from their website to Medium. In this situation, users start off on the company’s website, and then migrate over to Medium to read their blog. This really benefits Medium in many ways, from an SEO perspective, as Medium receives more SEO power from the link. For the company, on the other hand, this can do more than just simply not allow the website to benefit from the blog’s SEO power. The website’s SEO strength may be lowered by linking to an outside website, such as Medium, for their blog.
Keeping Users on Your Website
When users come to your crypto company’s website, they are there for a reason. They may have heard about your project from a friend. Better yet, your SEO efforts may have paid off and the user came to you via a Google search. No matter how they got to you, once they are on your website the goal is to have them stay for as long as possible. When users stay on your website for a longer period of time, this strengthens the website in the eyes of Google. The average time spent on a website is one of the parameters that Google looks at when determining the relevancy of a website.
For companies that host their blog on Medium, users only spend a short amount of time on the company’s website. Instead of staying to read blog articles, users are sent off to another website. If a user arrived to a company’s website via a Google organic search, sending the user to another website may actually hurt that website’s ranking.
By now you should be convinced that the best place for your company’s blog is on your company’s website. The next step is to incorporate some basic SEO tips to craft strong content for your blog.
SEO Guidelines for Writing Your Blog Posts
There are many guidelines that can be beneficial to you and guide you in crafting strong content to boost your website’s SEO strength. First, you’ll want to consider the topic and the associated keywords. Choose one of the keywords to be the main keyword. You’ll see how it is used in the coming paragraphs.
When deciding on length, you want to make sure that the article is a good length. Too short, and Google will consider it irrelevant. Too long, and readers will be intimidated (although for complex topics or interesting stories, a long-form blog is acceptable). Ideally, a blog post would be about 1-2 pages long if it was printed.
After you have finished writing your content, create strong meta tags. A meta tag consists of a few parts. It is important that all the different tags are unique and none of them are exactly like any of the others.
First, write your meta title. This should be around the same length as a newspaper headline, and just as informative. It is important to include the keyword you consider to be the main keyword in your meta title. The meta title is the title of the blog post that will appear in a Google search result list.
Then, write a meta description. This is the short description of your blog post that will appear under the meta title in a Google search result list. Don’t make your meta description too long, or it will be cut off.It is important to include the main keyword in the meta description as well.
Finally, write an H1 title. This is the main title of your blog post that will appear on the actual page of the blog post. The title’s length can vary but should be of a similar length as a meta title. Be sure to include the keyword you consider to be the main keyword in the H1 title as well.
There are a few other smaller details to consider when writing your blog post. You will want to make the URL different from the H1 title or the meta title. You will also want to include the main keyword at least three times in the body of the article. You can include a few other fitting keywords at least one time in the body of the article as well.
The best of both worlds
If you still want to have your content available to the large audience on Medium, there's good news for you. Medium has an easy-to-use importing tool that will allow you to migrate any content from your own website. The tool will even back-date it so that the publishing date on Medium matches the one on your own site.
Duplicating content across multiple sites can be damaging for your SEO in some instances, but Medium takes that into account, too. The import feature automatically includes a canonical link reference to your site. "A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical" or "preferred" version of a web page as part of search engine optimization." (Wikipedia)
Conclusion
Medium is a great website and the benefits from publishing content on Medium should not be ignored. There is a lot of valuable content on Medium as well as the opportunity to spread your company’s message and increase brand awareness. However, publishing your blog on your own website may increase the amount of organic traffic you receive, which can be especially important when trying to promote an initial coin offering (ICO) or security token offering (STO). This may not happen immediately, but the long-term benefits are worth it. Companies should never forget the power of SEO. It is important to publish your company’s blog on your website in order to fully benefit from the SEO power optimized blog posts can provide to your website. Finally, by using Medium's import tool, you can choose to share some or all of your blog content on both platforms, and enjoy the SEO benefits of having content on your own site, and the exposure benefits of being on Medium!