How To Utilize Your Blog For SEO

Darren Franks - September 26, 2008

A blog, or web log, is a website created by an individual with constant updates of articles, essays and general information about a certain topic. How does this relate to SEO? Maintaining a blog on your website brings natural traffic by creating a community of sorts that gets people interested in your cause and/or business. The constant flow of new content that a blog provides is the sustenance that search engines crave. So, how do you utilize a blog for SEO?

As mentioned above, constant updates are bait to those search engine spiders. Search engines adore new updates and fresh information to scour. It’s the general consensus that one needs to consistently add a blog post at least once a week. What’s great about most blogging software is that it allows you to write your post and schedule it for whenever you want. You could even write some of your posts at the beginning of the month and arrange them to be posted over the following couple weeks.

You also need to consider, for business purposes, whether your blog is attached to you main site or whether it will be on its own domain. What is the best option? As with all aspects of SEO, this is up for debate. It would probably be more advisable to have the blog as part of your site, especially if your domain is an older, trusted domain. Setting up a whole new domain related to your business would take time to get trusted by the search engines. It would also be advisable to set up a free Blogger account (Google’s free blogging website) as a first step before going to the effort of hosting it internally.

When the blog is set up, you can just go ahead and optimize it in the regular fashion. Select the keywords you want to target and include them in the title of your blog post and in the post itself, always keeping in mind that it’s really not good practice to spam your blog with said keywords — search engines don’t like that! Also, if you are pushing a product or one of your websites, keep in mind that it’s not really a good idea to just plug your own cause. It could come across to your visitor that your only agenda is self promotion. Mention other related products and services, but always make yours the emphasis. Also, your site feeds could be used to promote your blog and you could cultivate relationships with other blogs and have them link to you.

Blogs are a great resource in terms of search engine optimization. Remember to always tweak to keep your loyal and new blog visitors interested. Additionally, keep your goals clear. Are you trying to be purely informational and position yourself as your chosen fields’ authority? Is this blog merely for fun and you’re just trying to get that traffic to get people to click on your AdSense ads or are you trying to promote your business? So, whatever the long term plan is, keep up on your optimization efforts!