Blogging for SEO

The art of blogging has been around for decades. Many businesses realize the true impact ​a blog can have on their search engine marketing and SEO campaigns. The result: Business-related blogs ​are a very marketable and profitable SEO tool.

Blogs can have the following effects on your search engine optimization:

• Help your company find its niche.
• Increase the traffic coming to your site.
• Send your depth of content and page rank soaring.
• Satisfy readers with in-depth information they need related to your topics.
• Make you a fast friend of the search engines.

Every site in the industry could receive a healthy boost in the search engines simply by posting regularly to a company blog. So why haven’t you started one yet?

The strength of your blog lies in its relevant, keyword-rich content and its ability to attract inbound links. Because blog entries are usually written on industry-related topics, the search engine will view your posts as being linked together and classify it as relevant content. Your daily posts on industry news, marketing campaigns, product releases, acquisitions or all-purpose general conversation will all count toward your page count as well as your perceived expertise.

While creating your entries, it is very important to keep your keywords in mind. There is no need to pack them awkwardly into your sentences, but a few mentions of your company’s targeted terms will help your organic search engine rankings.

Blogs can do amazing things for page count. ​Blog host services (such as WordPress or Blogger) generate a unique HTML page for each individual ​post. That means one new page for every ​article you write, giving you lots of new pages and a ​potential jump in authority and PageRank.

Blogging is an excellent way to create pages for your website in a short amount of time. A blog entry added daily or weekly may be all you need to beef up your content around topics you want to rank for.

Regular posting also helps your indexing. Search engines typically prefer large sites over smaller ones, working under the notion that large, active sites are more likely to offer expert opinion than smaller ones. Frequent blogging will ensure that your site is crawled more frequently than sites that do not use blogs.

Search engines love blogs for many reasons.

First, blogs are usually written in a simple format, making them exceedingly easy for spiders to work through. The page code is often very clean, text​-rich HTML.

Secondly, blogs give search engines exactly what they want ​— original content written in a natural way. What could be better?

If you’ve had a hard time acquiring inbound links, blogs may be your answer. Bloggers often include links to other sources within their copy. ​If your blog is interesting, other bloggers may link to it in their articles. ​These links to your site increase your overall traffic as well.

Also offer an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is an easy way to way to dispense your blog online. Anyone can subscribe to your RSS feed, which they’ll do using a “news reader,” and they’ll be notified of any new updates or posts.

Email subscribers to your blog offer another valuable marketing opportunity. A popup or other type of interactive form on your website can let visitors add themselves to your email list, and then you can set up a process to (manually or automatically) email your subscribers each new post as it’s published. Over time, as you build up this list, you’ll be serving a growing number of readers interested in your topic. As your quality content consistently reaches their inboxes, they’ll be reminded of your brand regularly. You’ll also learn more about who your audience is and what topics they prefer as you watch your email open rates.

When used correctly, blogs can be an invaluable tool for your search engine marketing campaign, helping you to create a deeper level of content, rank higher in the engines and increase organic search engine traffic.

Want More SEO Information? Check out our guides to writing — Key Considerations when Writing Content, Copywriting 101, or check out our own company blog .