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Why Blogging is Great for SEO

A lot of times we think of blogging as a personal thing for sharing thoughts, experiences and passions with the world. Of course there are the blogs which exist to make money, but again they are filled with personal perspectives and insight. Yet a lot of SEO consultants suggest that clients add a blog to their business websites. But why exactly is this such a frequent recommendation? For many reasons blogging is a really smart SEO move. Having a business blog creates opportunities for improved visibility and interaction. But let’s look specifically at why blogging is so valuable to SEO.

Pages That Rank

The primary function of any SEO campaign is to improve a website’s organic rankings. Now most business websites have specific product or service related keywords they want to rank for. But the more competitive those phrases are, the more difficult that task can be. Beyond that, optimizing a website for the multitude of possible search phrase variations can be a herculean challenge.

If you think of every page of your site as a possible entry way from search engines, blogging can create hundreds of doors for potential customers to walk through. When you blog, you have the opportunity to focus on any number of topics, or questions surrounding your primary business. Say you are in the business of selling apparel, well terms like “women’s clothing” are highly competitive, but a blog gives you the opportunity to address a subject like “Are Pajama Jeans for real?”  It’s a much more specific kind of search query, but an area where your individual blog post stands a much better chance to rank well without much effort. The more your blog focuses on smaller sections of your niche the more possible entrance paths you create to your website. While converting the casual information seeker to a buyer requires landing page optimization and call-to-actions, the first step is getting the traffic. And as every business knows, getting people in the door is the first step to making sales.

Quality Content

Speaking of ranking, one of the most important measures for building a website’s over all organic rankings is back links. And one of the best ways to attract back links is by offering quality content that is worth sharing. Many commercial websites still fail to understand the value of providing content that isn’t their product listings. But the reality is, most other websites aren’t as interested in linking to product pages or an about page as we would like to imagine. In order to attract merit based links, it takes content of value. Referring back to our blog post on Pajama Jeans, with a good article about them, one that perhaps incorporates some history, science or humor you wind up with a blog post that other sites might find worth quoting, linking to, or sharing with their own readers.

It may be said that search engines “like” new content. Well Google isn’t a Facebook friend liking your status, but adding new content to a website on a regular basis can be attractive to spider bots. Websites that add new content frequently stand a better chance of being crawled more often. It signifies to search engines that this site is updated regularly with fresh content that should be indexed and returned in search results for the purpose of providing Search engine users with the most recently available content. New blog posts may also be picked up by the “News” vertical of Google which is just another reason why frequent blogging can improve your overall visibility.

Voice and Community

Perhaps one of the best reasons for a business to blog is the pure humanity of it. Blogging is one of the best ways to give a company a personality and a voice. The more real and human that voice is, the more you can really connect with readers. That kind of relationship can grow into a compelling reason for a customer to choose you over a competitor. When you blog regularly, and your content is worth reading, you also become a destination site for readers. People will subscribe to an interesting, educational or entertaining news feed that consistently offers material worth reading.

Blogs also attract comments which encourage interactions, conversations and community. A blog that has a thriving community of regular readers, contributors and commenter’s is the kind of hot bed of activity that any business should want associated with their site. The thing about great content is that no matter how good it is, it won’t get links if no one knows about it, and blog communities can help make sure that you content is discovered and shared. Not only that, community is a breeding ground for customer loyalty, and loyal customers can easily become brand evangelists.

Blog posts may also help with reputation management challenges by providing additional high ranking listings which can help fill the top ten results for your business name, keeping any less favorable mentions buried deeper in the SERPs.

For theses, and many other reasons, blogging and business are a happy marriage. There are numerous ways that a blog can improve your SEO. On-page it helps you rank for keyword variations and for specific questions or issues related to individual products. But it also helps you off-site by providing a rich opportunity for creating link-worthy content and a network of community members willing and excited to pass that content on to others.  When you put the effort into building a successful blog, the returns in SEO value can be immeasurable.

Jessica is an active writer and blogger for Reputation Observer, a German reputation management program. Occasionally she also writes for the French version of Reputation Observer as well. She has studied SEO, link building and social media for a number of years.

Tags: seo

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