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

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.

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

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!

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.

Cheers,
Lee