SEO Benefits from Blogs

Posted on January 19, 2007
Filed Under SE Optimization

Is blog optimization part of search marketing? Absolutely! Blogs are web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites.
If you can optimize a document and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by a search engine, it’s part of search marketing in my book. As such, marketers should be aware of how these kinds of channels can be used within the overall online marketing mix.Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization.

I sincerely believe using blog software to manage certain kinds of content on a web site such as an online media room, to archive newsletters, post frequently asked questions and to provide product updates can make a site that is otherwise very search engine un-friendly, become a viable source of great rankings. This applies to both regular search engines as well as blog search engines. These are applications for a blog besides the common use as a platform to increase credibility and communicate a more personalized voice for a company.

Blogs are no silver bullet though and require working hard and smart - especially smart. However the payoff can be significant.

Online Marketing Blog receives the majority of it’s traffic from search engines. I can’t mention any of our clients, so I’ll risk being a bit vain and offer a few of our own examples. This is a blog after all and these are very practical, verifiable ranking examples.
Of course the rules can change slightly over time, but here are a set of benefits I often find myself explaining to people wondering about the search engine optimization benefits of having a blog.

1. Structured content - Blog software with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to algorithmically categorize content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.

2. Crawlable URLs - Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

3. Internal links - Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long tail phrases.

4. Inbound link magnet - One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other - much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, thus encouraging links and traffic.

Bonus benefit of a blog:

Blog & RSS Directories - With a blog and corresponding RSS feed(s), your site can now benefit from visibility within blog and RSS search engines. Web sites without feeds (your competition maybe?) are not included in these kinds of directories and search engines.

Read full article at http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com/2007/01/seo_benefits_fr.html On http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com