The Benefits of Blogs
I recently read an article on the SEO benefits of blogs. It was a great reminder and I learned something along the way. Whether you’re currently using blogs to improve your rankings or are thinking of adding blogs to your site, I think you will find this information useful.
The first thing that struck me is this….”Blogs are no silver bullet and require working hard and smart. And, the payoff can be significant”. Isn’t that true!
As with all online marketing, the rules continue to change over time, but here is a list of benefits of using blogs to enhance and support your SEO efforts.
Blogs make it easier for search engines to understand your content.
No one understands your site and content as well as you do. By structuring your content in blogs according to themes, it makes it easier for search engines (and your visitors) to understand your content which leads to a higher ranking on those topics.
Blogs make it easier for spiders to find and crawl blog content.
Many blog software solutions have simple URL structures making it easier for blogs to find and crawl your content. If the spiders can’t find or crawl your content, what’s the point?
Blogs help bring detailed product and service information to the surface.
It is sometimes difficult to get individual products and services listed on the search engines. If you mention specific products and service in your blog with internal links to those pages, it gives the spiders something to follow to get deep down into your site and to the valuable content you have.
Blogs attract reciprocal links.
It is sometimes difficult for Web sites to get other sites to link to them. However, with blogs and the abundance of content including text, audio and video, it is much easier to generate incoming links. More links means more traffic.
Blogs provide fresh content which is highly rewarded.
Visitors and search engines alike appreciate fresh content which leads to repeat visits. This means your site will be crawled more frequently allowing new content to be searchable more quickly.
Blogs encourage interaction.
An active blog means your readers will post comments, talk about your blog in other forums, at even offline at conferences. This type of activity generates more traffic and is rewarded by the search engines.
The biggest benefit of a blog has nothing to do with search engine ranking.
The biggest value is with the use of RSS feeds and inbound links that have nothing to do with search engines. With the use of blogs, we now have new alternatives to generating substantial traffic in addition to the traffic generated through search engines.
Conclusion: If you do one thing in 2007, add a blog to your Web site and test aggressively with these alternative traffic generating programs. You’ll generate new traffic to your site and in the process improve your search engine ranking and traffic. But remember, it’s not a magic bullet. Carve out time at least weekly to add fresh content to your blog and work smart to generate traffic. The payoff will be worth it!