I’ve been blogging for a while now, and before I started doing so I launched, ran and sold a search engine optimization (SEO) company. To be fair, I actually started blogging prior to selling the SEO business, but let’s just say it wasn’t a mainstay in my SEO efforts at that time. Blogging has been around for so long now that to consider it “new” would be entirely inaccurate. Still, though blogging no longer has the lustre of the new, hip and “bleeding edge” (bra’), it has moved comfortably into the genre of “what works”.

I’m not saying that one should write a blog merely for SEO purposes, because this rarely works in the long term. Rather, a blog can be used as part of an overall web marketing and advertising strategy that includes a focus on both the end user, i.e. - the site’s visitors, and the search engines. Google’s “webmaster guidelines” actually note that you shouldn’t do anything with your site that is aimed specifically at manipulating the search engines. While that is a bit broad, let me just say that I agree that producing content ONLY to be consumed by search engines (whether the content is cloaked or not) is not so good an idea if you’re in it for the long run. If, on the other hand, you wish to add content to your web site often, and you would like to communicate directly with visitors to your site in a more informal manner than that which your site generally allows, a blog is a great idea.

Here are a few of the greatest benefits of blogging, from both an SEO and general perspective:

• Allow the site owner to easily add content, without knowledge of HTML, FTP uploading, etc.
• Blogs often automatically produce RSS feeds, which offer a “site map” for search engines and content to be aggregated by users and other sites (incoming links)
• Blogs naturally recieve links - link to others in your industry/area of focus and they’ll likely link back, often in their own “blogroll”
• Provide an easy method of communicating with others, and letting the communicate with you, via comments
• Search engines LOVE blogs, and will come back daily to crawl new content if you add posts on a regular basis
• Great way to get a new site indexed, even if you don’t have many links coming in to the site
• Get picked up in Technorati and other blog and feed search engines
• Allow one to establish him or herself as an authority in a given arena - helpful in selling a product or service

There are more great reasons to blog, but those noted above are the most obvious and the most important, in my opinion.

It’s also worth noting that blogging has become so important in the minds of many site owners that they’re actually outsourcing the writing of their blogs and sometimes the overall management. Editor’s Ink, for example, writes the blogs for a variety of companies (hint, hint). We also will manage a blog, ranging from WordPress installation, plugin setup and update installs to writing blog posts and “seeding” in the social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Netscape, etc. (only when the content *really* should be on those sites, mind you). Finally worth noting is that WordPress is just about the most elegant and easy to use application I’ve ever come across. If you’re thinking about starting a blog, I highly recommend the hosted version.

Tags: blog management, blog writing, blogging, seo, social bookmarking

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