Blogging has been around for a while now, whether personal web journals or huge company announcements, many people have found good use for them. SEO has a particular interest in blogs or blogging, though the average search engine marketer may look at it differently than the average consumer or business owner.
Why is blogging so appealing from an SEO standpoint? Because it is uniquely suited to provide the website in question with some great search engine fodder.
To start with, search engines love content, especially relevant content. And more than that, they love new content. The unfortunate problem that many SEOs are faced with when they take on a new client is the prospect that there is simply no reason or method to validly add new content - relevant or not.
If the new client sells a lawn care service, exactly how often is that going to change? Is there going to be some new, groundbreaking technology that will revolutionize the industry? Are the company offerings going to change on a daily basis? Unlikely. So in cases like these, the company could choose to miss out on the related SEO benefits of new and changing content, or they can start and maintain a blog.
With a blog even the small lawn care company can keep the content flowing. Got a new mower? Drop in a picture and your thoughts on its performance. Or is there a new do-it-yourself guide product on the market? Then maybe an article on how to use it productively would be a good idea.
There are even more SEO benefits than fresh content when you add a blog to your marketing campaign. And one of those is links. You can, of course, build up your internal liking architecture between blog articles and also between your blog and the regular site. In fact, this is practically a requirement. However, there is a larger opportunity here and that is to develop external, one-way links.
Links, it is widely known, are one of the most important factors a search engine uses to judge a site's quality and relevance. There are many SEO techniques out there that can be employed to gather these links. And blogs, or at least the articles on these blogs, create great opportunities to achieve great results.
As you participate in the blogosphere and start to increase your traffic people will start reading and hopefully enjoying your articles. When they see something of value in your blog they are going to link to it in their own blogs or possibly submit it to social bookmarking sites. This, in turn, can increase your exposure, then your visits, then achieve some more links.
The key, then, when writing your blog with SEO in mind is to, well, keep SEO in mind. All the best practices that apply to search engine optimization also apply to your blogging.
In other words, don't fill your blog with useless, keyword-stuffed content. People are visiting blogs because they are looking for something with substance. They are looking for an opinion they can trust. If all they find are nonsensical uses of keywords, they won't come back. They especially won't see any reason to link to you.
You must also avoid duplicate content issues. With blogs it's a little different than regular website content because most blogging software automatically creates a permanent page that may or may not duplicate the content on the front page. But that doesn't mean it's okay to keep repeating yourself. No one likes reruns.
Blogging and SEO are two practices that can help you reach the top of the search engine results pages. You need to be there to get noticed, but if you've used questionable practices to do it, you will receive the kind of attention and reputation you really don't want. But if you do it right, you can secure your position at the top.
Andy Eliason is a writer at Main10, Inc, a Utah Internet Marketing company. If you'd like to learn more about using blogs in your SEO practices, visit their site today. |
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