The SEO Benefits of Blogging
08 August 2010 : Industry News
Ian Lockwood is a hugely experienced and widely respected online marketing specialist who has written the following article about the SEO benefits of blogging. Read on and take careful note...
There are a number of reasons that a business can benefit from a blog on their website, from customer engagement through comments and responses, to providing a more human voice to complement the company’s brand. Blogs can even simply provide a ready-made “latest news” system. One thing that can’t be ignored, even if you don’t feel that you need any of the above, is that a blog can really help with your search engine optimisation.
There are a number of reasons for this, the first of which is that a blog provides a way to regularly update your website with new content, without cluttering up your main navigation and pages. In effect, a blog sits in parallel with your main website, but will still be seen as part of the same website by Google (as long as you host it under your own domain, e.g. www.website.com/blog). Search engines like to see regularly updated websites, as it is a signal that they contain up to date information. Moreover, regularly adding new content about your subject area means you are building a significant resource of articles containing your keywords, which really helps search engines to understand the topics for which your site is relevant.
Another search engine benefit with blogs is that they provide “ping” functionality, which notifies services (including some search engines) that new content is available. This means that blog posts are often indexed by search engines much more quickly than a new, normal web page, which has to wait to be found by the search engine spider. Blog posts can end up in search results within literally minutes of being published.
Blogging software, such as WordPress, also makes it incredibly easy to optimise pages for keywords. For example, simply ensure that your target keywords are in the title of your blog post and if you have chosen the right settings, the heading will also be that page’s title tag, H1 (heading) tag, the anchor text of links to the post and the URL of the page – all important elements of on-page optimisation. SEO capability is further enhanced by the many plug-ins available to expand the functionality of blogs.
Finally, the social nature of blogs, with readers subscribing to them for regular updates and commenting on posts as they see fit, means that blogs tend to attract links. Other bloggers may read your posts and link to them if they think they are interesting, useful, or even if they disagree with them! Links, of course, are the lifeblood of SEO and without them, you’re unlikely to rank highly for your keywords.
So, I would strongly encourage those of you reading this who have a website, but no blog, to consider adding one. You will need discipline to regularly post on it, as a sparse blog won’t reflect well on your business, but the benefits are certainly worth the time required. You might even find a new creative outlet!
Ian Lockwood is a director of Boom Online Marketing, and would love to talk to you about adding a blog to your website!
