Blogging for SEO

Emily Creech - February 5, 2009

Blogging began as a way for individuals to communicate, sharing personal experiences and self-expression though an online diary. Today blogs (short for Web Logs) have expanded beyond individual use. Now businesses of all sizes are blogging to connect with customers, prospects or employees to share information, knowledge and expertise.

We’ve all heard that blogging can be beneficial from a search engine optimization (SEO) point of view, but it’s often unclear why it can be helpful.   As I’ve been approached with this question a few times recently, I wanted to take this opportunity to point out a few reasons how it can help to boost your SEO efforts.  

–   First, blogs provide an opportunity to offer up-to-date and informative content to your readers. This can help to portray your organization as a resource and can build credibility for your brand.  

–   Adding pages to your website is also easy with blogs and each additional post has the potential to rank in the search results (as actual pages rank in the results, not websites). Ensuring that the titles, body content and the anchor text of any links are keyword-rich can spread your reach for additional keywords.   Additionally, blogs are very search engine friendly.   Every time a post is uploaded, the search engines are alerted to the fact that there is new content to crawl. By having a blog, you are inviting the search engines to come to your site more often, which in turn will ensure that you have the most up to date information indexed in the search results.

–   Quality information shared through blogging can also serve as ‘link bait’, encouraging others to link to your blog post or website. It is important that your blog has a purpose, and that your purpose is perceived as valuable by your readers. Blogs that are viewed as valuable will attract incoming links and those incoming links can indicate a blog’s popularity or authority to the search engines.

–   Blogs can also be a great way to bring your brand into the realm of social media. Sharing your blog’s content within social media channels will also help to gain links when shared among participants of social networks. Social media channels will facilitate the distribution of your message and enable your readers to essentially do the marketing for you. If you participate in MySpace, Facebook or Twitter, you can have your blog pulled into these channels to update your friends, fans and followers.

Do you have informative content that you can share with your site visitors?   Do you have a unique viewpoint of a product or service?   If so, creating a blog can be a great way to share your ideas and create a community that is involved with your product or service.     Like any other form of internet marketing, you’ll be able to monitor and evaluate your blog through an analytics program.