In this day of age everyone loves blogs and yes that includes Google. Well as you will learn if you have not already when Google loves something you have no choice but to embrace it and start having some feelings for it to. The following article explains why blogs are a search engine optimizers best friend and why they should soon (if they are not already) be a big part of your business’ online strategy, if you want to increase your traffic and sales.
Blogs make it easier for search engines to understand their content which makes it much easier for you to impress the search engines and start ranking on the first page for your main keywords. Almost all blogging software organizes posts and data through categories which allows you to organize your content in specific themes. The bottom line is blog architecture and effective category usage make your target key words and phrases very easy for search engines to find, index and rank. To understand how this works you need to understand how blogs work in comparison to your traditional website.
Let’s say you post a article on your traditional website about how great your product is. This article is posted on one single page with maybe one or two links from your homepage or interior pages to it. This means you give the search engines only one or two chances of finding and indexing your article.
Now you post that same article to your blog. The blog software posts the article to your main blog page in a long list normally sorted by date of all your recent blog posts. The article is given its own specific page within the blog and if you assign the article to a category the article is again posted on that specific categories page. So for one posting you just got three different pages on your blog with your article on it and keyword rich interior links throughout your blog that link to the article. For even more exposure assign your article to more then one relevant category and get even more links and pages on your blog with your article on it.
Search engines love keyword rich links that take you to content rich articles that focus on your key word phrases. To get all the exposure and keyword rich links a blog gives you for just one single article post would take you forever on a traditional website.
Blog posts also can easily be placed into RSS feeds automatically with no additional effort from the blog webmaster. When this happens other people online and even other blogs can subscribe to get updates every time you make a new entry into your blog. When your RSS feeds are syndicated like this embedded links back to your blog and article are included. This means even more links are created and posted on other websites around the Internet that link back to your blog. Now with just one post you created a number of keyword rich internal links followed up by many (possibly 100’s) of keyword rich external links. If your RSS feed is submitted to a blog or RSS directory you can even benefit more by being indexed in blog or RSS search engines where other competing business’ are not listed because they do not have a blog or RSS feed.
Blogs are not something that you can create then let sit. You must constantly maintain and update your blog with fresh content and posts or else you will quickly loose RSS feed subscribers and erase all the SEO benefits you created when you first started your blog. These updates do take time but they make Google and other search engines like you even better. Fresh updated content means that search engines will constantly be crawling your website with their spiders and keep indexing more and more pages of your blog. Compared to a static website that does not get updated very often you will have a huge advantage in getting ranked for your dream keywords in Google. The more pages that Google has indexed for your site the more relevant your site becomes and the more authority each one of your posts has in ranking over a competitor for a specific key word or phrase. Plus your blog will force you to stay on top of your business and keep it fresh and up to date with new ideas and new energy.
So I hope at this point you understand the huge SEO benefits of having a blog associated to your business and website. Tons of keyword rich internal and external links and constant crawling and monitoring by the search engines. Well guess what? Blogs even have more benefits then this.
Blogs with active readers who comment on articles and posts are like mini online communities. These users link back to their favorite blogs in online profiles and constantly interact with the blog. Now you do not have to do all the work yourself because you just got a team of people to go out and start giving you even more links and more references to your business all over the Internet. In this day of age blogs are a invaluable asset to your online marketing and SEO strategies and should not be ignored.
So what does this mean for you and your business?
* Start a blog
* Make keyword rich and content relevant categories that are displayed on the main page of your blog
* Make sure you update your blog regularly with content that is GOOD. No one likes to read boring content
* Start a RSS feed of your blogs content
* Submit your blog and RSS feed to all the directories that you can
* Link to your blog from your main website
* Promote your blog as a community for your current customers and future customers to find out whats going on with your business on a regular basis.
* Watch your Google rankings for your dream key words and phrases shoot up and your web traffic increase
Well blogs can be fun but they are a lot of work. You MUST stay on top of them with regular updates which can be a pain sometimes but the benefits you gain for your website and business are so so valuable. If you get tired of updating your blog all the time and have nothing fresh and new to say to your customers then maybe you should rethink your business? Blogs can benefit all types of business’ from a retail stores to a information site. No business in my opinion is dedicated enough to their online marketing efforts if they have not created a blog to go along with there website.
