David Leonhardt’s SEO and Social Media Marketing

Why blogs are good for SEO

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Just a few reasons why a blog is a great tool for SEO.

Fresh content - the search engines love that.
Growing website - the search engines love that, too.
Multiple variations of keywords to attract highly-targeted long-tale searchers.
Highly relevant pages from which to link into the main pages of your website.
Keeps you in touch with your topic, not just the technicalities of SEO.
You can submit your blog to blog-specific directories, providing extra link love.
You can easily trade content, not just links.
Assuming you can generate even a modest amount of traffic for your blog, you can get links to individual posts through social bookmarking (especially if you have a tool like TheBookmarketer at the bottom of each post, as I do).
Blog open doors to real-people networking on the Internet, and that is always helpful when it comes to link-building and other forms of collaboration, such as blogrolls and webrings.

There are probably a few dozen more reasons why blogs are good for SEO, so why not post your favorite reasons in the comments section below?

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 10:12 am and is filed under SEO, blogging, bookmarking, content, deep links, linking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments to “Why blogs are good for SEO”

lee (1 comments) Says:
May 17th, 2008 at 3:43 am

Hi,
I got here from EzineArticles. Must have read one of your articles.
i would have to agree with you.
Blogs always rank higher than websites
But I also seen some supposed to be good blogs that rank pretty bad…

Cheers,
Lee

AR, Insurance Planner (1 comments) Says:
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:55 pm

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

RSS - Links to RSS feed urls that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.

Fresh content - Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.

Active community - Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.

Non-Search traffic - I think the greatest benefit of having an active blog has little to do with improving your search engine rankings though. The best thing about blogs is that they allow you to generate substantial amounts of traffic via RSS and links that have NOTHING to do with search engines. My recommendation to marketers in 2007 is to pursue traffic alternatives to search engines as aggresively as their budgets and marketing programs will allow. The result will be incremental increases in site traffic with search engine referred traffic an added bonus, if not correspondingly enhanced.

Héctor (1 comments) Says:
May 24th, 2008 at 8:41 am

Hi,

At very first, want to tell you I think this blog is great! Let me tell you that I don’t usually leave comments on them because of my lack of time. But wanted to make this remark: what you say about blogs is 100 % true. Anyway, I think that the first reply is not exactly true. I have blogs that “support” my web pages and - on my opinion - it is not easier to have a PR higher with a blog. It depends on a series of facts. Great job, David. Go on this way!

David Leonhardt (82 comments) Says:
May 24th, 2008 at 9:39 pm

Hola Héctor.

Estoy de acuerdo. Para propósitos de SEO, así como para construir las relaciones, los blogs trabajan mejor para sostener el sitio del negocio.

baloch (2 comments) Says:
June 30th, 2008 at 10:06 am

@AR, Insurance Planner
very well said

It is true indeed that blogs are more search engine friendly but what i find is that blogs lack the usability that a website has. I would rather gather information from a website then a blog because for me and maybe some of you a well designed and presented website gives the sense of calm. Blogs are more opinion based and resource based while websites are based on facts and resources.

Keyword Patterns (1 comments) Says:
October 8th, 2008 at 3:57 pm

I love using blogs as most importantly it allows for continuing growth and search engines love blogs. Plus blogs allow for a community where static sites do not invoke user involvement.

presentations help (1 comments) Says:
January 1st, 2009 at 7:10 am

Okay - a basic question then….

Suppose I have something I want to say: am I better of with it as an article on my blog to get new content which Google likes or as articles on other people's sites which gets me inbound links (which Google also likes!) ?

Simon

Outsourcing Avenues (1 comments) Says:
January 15th, 2009 at 10:20 am

Yes of course, blog ranks higher than websites if it is optimized well and regularly updated. And as far as concerning to Simon's issue, I would like to say that best articles should be kept within your own site and others can be provided to others for inbound links.

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