Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at much of the background surrounding SEO. We’ve gone through the notion of creating a new website from an SEO point of view, through targeting keywords, researching competition, indexing your new site and acquiring good links to it. More recently, we’ve looked at a newer form of SEO technique in utilising RSS feeds as part of your link building strategy. Today, were going to look at another activity I highly recommend you do in today’s online world – blogging.
Now, blogging is undoubtedly about far more than simply SEO. Some people blog for fun, some people blog because they have something to say, some people even blog because everyone else does…but all of these people have one thing in common, they want to be seen and read. There are many great thing about blogging, but I’m going to focus on why blogging is great for SEO.
So, Why Is Blogging Great For SEO?
Many people view blogs as having some ‘magical’ power to simply rank high within search engines for no apparently logical reason. The truth is that blogs are ‘magic’, but that this magic has a number of logical principles working away underneath. Knowing a bit about what these principles are can help you make your blog posts work better for you, and might also give you one or two ideas you can take away and apply when marketing your main website too. Here’s my summary of the ‘magic’ that underpins blogs…
1. Creating Content Consistently and Easily
Blogs are inherently easy to setup and run. By utilising an editing screen based largely around the common word processor interface were all used to, most people find blogs easier to update than websites using often more complex website CMS systems. Because a blog asks for open thoughts, opinions and words they are easier for most us to write, especially when compared to more corporately driven websites which usually require us to stick to a brand style, tone and page word limit. As a result, we create more content because we have more freedom of expression.
There are three great things about creating ever increasing content. Firstly search engines love fresh content. If you update your blog often, they will visit your more often and generally reward you with higher rankings. Secondly, more and more content gives other blog and website owners more opportunities to read, enjoy and link to your pages – the more pages you have out there, the more unsolicited links you probably find you attract. The third great thing is actually our 2nd overall point, read below..
2. Catching Longtail Keyword Searches
When we looked at researching keywords in our earlier posts, we were primarily concerned with what we call ‘short tail’ keywords. Short Tail keywords are those keywords that are searched for regularly each month and tend to be the ones we web marketing types focus on – because they are predictable and measurable. Yet short tail keywords make up only 30% of all web searches. This means that 70% of all keyword searches are unique in some way and hence cannot be tracked or predicted. This in turn means that the webpages out there with the most words on them have the best chance of top ranking for long tail keywords. Blogs, by their nature, are a lot more about words than pictures and hence one of the major reasons they attract good web traffic is because they tend to catch long tail searches – our third great thing about content creation. Put simply, more content = more longtail traffic.
3. Auto Pinging & Other SEO Features
Because ‘blogging’ has come to be after the need for SEO grew, blog platforms have created their scripts with at least an element of SEO in mind. One of the most useful features of a blog is their ability to ‘ping’. Pinging is the process by which you tell search engines and blog directories that you have some new content for them to crawl. Most of the major blog platforms have inbuilt functionality that instantly tells SE’s and directories when you have published a new post. This means that regularly updated blogs are crawled often and new blogposts can often indexed within hours of publication. In fact, if you have a regularly crawled blog, one of the easiest ways to get a new website indexed is to place a link straight to it from your high content blog!
Some of you may already know that I’m a huge fan of WordPress. WordPress has a number of fantastic SEO plugins, in addition to pinging, that make the whole notion of optimisation so much easier. If you’re a WordPress user and would like my list of favourite WordPress SEO plugins, send me a nice message from the contact page and I’ll happily oblige.
4. Opportunities To Spread Blog Content
Three weeks ago, we looked at ways of utilising articles again and again across a variety of mediums. Blog posts can be utilised in exactly the same way, in fact writing regular blog posts will give you more and more content to promote, convert and promote again.
There are a number of ‘exclusive’ places online where you can promote your blogposts. The best of these are undoubtedly ‘blog carnivals‘. A ‘blog carnival’ is essentially a collection of the most informed blogposts on a specific topic. Featured blogposts will come from a number of blogs often spread throughout the world. To be featured in one offers you a highly relevant and highly powerful link which often has an immediately positive impact on your search engine rankings.
5. Another Domain, Another Feed
Your blog will require it’s own address to run from – isn’t this a great opportunity to go and buy another keyword rich domain? Just like your website, your blog can target ‘short tail’ keywords too – and so it should. Do your research and target another set of keywords that compliment the ones already chosen for your main site, if you get both your blog and your website ranking you’ll be making some serious dents online. Additionally, all blogs come with an instant RSS feed. Promote this feed throughout the directories we discussed last time, blend it, bookmark it, do everything you can to get links into it.
In many ways, blogs are actually easier to promote than standard websites. This is down to the fact that ‘blogging’ is what we call a web 2.0 property and hence comes ready made for the new online world of social networking, mobile sites and rss syndication. Being web 2.0 ready means that a blog can be found, and marketed, in many places that websites simply cannot. Remember to link out from your blogposts to your main website when the opportunity arises. Anything that does good things for your blog will then also in turn feed through to your main site too.
So, if you weren’t blogging yesterday, how you been persuaded to start today?
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