It seems like everyone on Earth has a blog these days. From CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to the teenager down the street, everybody is blogging about something. While there are many different reasons for starting a blog, there has been a rapidly growing trend with webmasters to add blogs to any and every website they have. Why do this? It's simple, the search engines love blogs!
As a webmaster, the way to keep the search engines interested in your site is to keep your content fresh. This isn't always easy or even necessary. If your website is designed to promote and sell your product, there's a good chance you won't need to update it very often. When the search engines see that the site is only being updated every few weeks, it will schedule its crawler to visit the website accordingly. This can be bad for webmasters as it can take weeks for newly added content to be picked up.
Adding a blog to an otherwise static website can help solve this problem and give the search engines a reason to visit a website more often. Blogs have quickly gained favorability with the search engines for several reasons. They are generally relatively simple in construction and programming and can be quickly and easily crawled and indexed. More importantly, they are full of fresh content and information. Blog platforms like Blogger.com and Wordpress have made it so easy to add content, that webmasters can update their blogs several times a week with very little effort. Most blog platforms will even allow for automatic "pinging" of the major search engines in order to let them know that the blog has been updated and needs to be revisited.
Once the search crawler comes to the site to index the new blog content, it will often look to the sitemap to see what other pages have been added or updated. This allows webmasters to get their new content indexed much more quickly than having to wait weeks for the spider to make its regular rounds. Given the benefits of better site indexing and increased relevant content, it is almost crazy not to have a blog on your website today. A Wordpress blog can be installed in less than five minutes and posts can be added in a similar timeframe. If you haven't embraced blogs yet, don't wait too long or you will continue to miss out on the easy web traffic.
Justin Scarborough is founder of the HireMyBlog blog advertising marketplace (http://www.hiremyblog.com). HireMyBlog brings bloggers together with advertisers to offer a new and effective method of web advertising. |
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