Why Does a Blog Help SEO?
Blogging seems to be the ideal solution for many things, one of which being SEO. Many people know this, and even more learn this, but I wonder if people often understand why having a blog is important for SEO. Basic and very practical SEO Tips tell us that we should avoid bad coding, use relevant keywords, be conscious of where we place them in text, and get inbound links. Considering these tips, then a blog is an ideal solution for SEO.
Let’s consider coding. Both WordPress and Blogger maintain excellent coding standards. Each platform comes with a standard (approved) template that meets the W3C standards. Actually, Blogger comes with around 25 and WordPress only has one. In both platforms, however, there are hundreds of open sourced templates available that also meet the coding standards. These templates can be downloaded and installed at no charge.
What about using relevant keywords? With a blog, you have all the tools needed to write about the topics you want and stay on topic. Each blogging platform gives you the ability to categorize, label, and or tag your articles by sub-topic. Writing content based on relevant keywords comes very easy doing so on a blog. Housing your content within a blog also gives you the ability to stay organized yourself and drill down into micro niche keywords and more longtail keyword topics.
Considering the ease of writing content around relevant keywords, obviously the placement of keywords comes easy too. With most blog platforms, especially Blogger and WordPress, users are given a rich text editor to use. This means that you can properly write content, placing your keywords in your intro paragraphs, and control the amount of reinforcing keywords within the body content and closing paragraph. Also, and most importantly, the rich text editor allows you to easily using heading, bold, and italic tags. Your rich text is formatted into W3C compliant HTML code in the background.
Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.
Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.
This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well. Now, with the blog itself, because you’re writing (or should be) excellent content that appeals to people, their natural behavior will be to link to the articles on your blog. Some readers may share your articles with friends by submitting them into social networking site such as Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and StumbleUpon. When that happens, your articles will be viewed by more people. Search engines, especially Google, keep track of this.
To summarize. A blog is a great thing to have if you’re focused on SEO. A blog can be used to help a main website rank better in search engines simply due to increasing inbound links. Secondly, a blog is a natural inbound link magnet itself. Thirdly, a blog provides users with excellent publishing tools to write and format content in a search engine friendly way. All in all, if you have a website, it would be an excellent idea to also have a blog, covering a relevant topic to your main site. Doing so could be the difference of your site landing on page one, or page doesn’t matter.
September 10th, 2009 at 5:40 am
absolutely true a blog is an ideal solution for SEO. nice post.
September 10th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Thanks for the compliment Beth… It’s great to have you here as a reader.
September 10th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
[...] post that caught my attention was titled “Why Does a Blog Help SEO?,” and was written by Garry Conn. Since I am a blogger and own an SEO company, I thought this [...]
September 11th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
This post is closer to blackhat seo than anything, if every company went out and made their blog at a seperate address just to get links from an outside domain, maybe two or three blogs? What good would that do? You don’t think Google is smart enough to figure that out? Thats why they give more link credit for the 1st inbound link from a site and then dis-credit the other links, its because of people doing stuff like your talking about. The best thing to do is to have one beautifully categorized site and blog all working for the same purpose, that folks is not the search engine spam that this article is telling you to do.
September 14th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Hi Jonathan, I don’t think you’re quite understanding my direction. We don’t think Walmart is doing anything blackhat with http://checkoutblog.com/ do we?
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:48 am
So there is an SEO benefit? Can you share the link to your site so I can see how it's done? Do you mean your blog content is on a blog page and is being updated as well on your home page…or are just the titles of the blog posts with links appearing as a widget in a side panel?
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Thanks for your insight, Garry. I have a question though. Why does the blog needs to be on a different IP? I have had many websites with blogs on the same domain. How does having it on a different IP help? Any research on this??
December 17th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Hi Garry, good post thanks. I am over marketing at Chill.ie an online insurance company and have just intorduced a blog onto our site, we were on page 8 when you search “cheap car insurance” now were on top of page 2 and climbing. Do you think having a Facebook presence and twitter enhances optimisation?
February 1st, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Hi Garry
I am ownig a site and have done some optimization myself very recently and google is in process of indexing my pages . What I want to know is that if I create a blog shall I need to give the link of the blog in my original site. i am bit confused by external inbound links and inbound links. My question is that shall I need to put the link of the blog in my site for SEO?
February 5th, 2010 at 4:00 am
Great post. I am also wondering if Twitter and Facebook help SEO optimisation. Does video help SEO optimisation as well?
February 16th, 2010 at 11:18 am
[...] “If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings …to summarize: a blog is a great thing to have if you’re focused on SEO.” Read the details on SEOHosting.com’s blog: http://www.seohosting.com/blog/articles/why-does-a-blog-help-seo/. [...]
April 10th, 2010 at 2:34 am
I have a small business and try to attract customers and need to change the information that is posted quite often so I was thinking of changing my website to a blog. Is there a benefit to having both a website and a blog or is it okay to just have a blog site.
thanks,
Scrappetizer
April 19th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
I think it will definitely be useful for someone learning SEO and Cool features of the SEO. Keep up the work.
May 7th, 2010 at 6:49 am
Hi,
I have read your post which provided benefits of blogs for seo point of views. Blog provide an platform to increase our popularity of our business or site and it is beneficial to getting back link for our site. I have an site http://www.blitzpenny.com and I have write many blogs for my site which are useful to increase my site serp’s which will be beneficial for increase my site traffic.
Thanks for sharing information
Keep it up!
June 23rd, 2010 at 4:23 am
Hi,
Doesn't having a blog actually on the site make a difference to SEO as well though?
It's all good having a separate blog site that you can post links on, but the content won't be accredited to your domain!
August 14th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
I loved your article but you can actually use a couple of social sharing buttons I’ve observed all over the place, this way I can mail this article to my good friends
September 8th, 2010 at 3:53 am
This is a my small bushiness and tray to attract costumers . That can post link on the bushiness
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anthonyskill
Tools Insurance
September 14th, 2010 at 5:37 am
blogging play vital role in SEO, this is the most basic task in SEO which we can never stop if we are concern with promoting with a website promotion. but over here we should be careful about the keywords, which must be appropriate, and should look for the good blogs. it can really increase traffic.
September 23rd, 2010 at 6:01 am
Interesting article! I really enjoyed reading this information and a think there a lot of other users who say you "thx" for sharing this with us.
October 8th, 2010 at 7:40 am
Hi,
Great article. In my opinion, blog is one of the best way to get high page rank in search engine. Thanks for sharing this useful and informative information with me.
October 20th, 2010 at 1:09 am
Hi Gary, I agree that blogging is a big part of any SEO strategy. Thanks for spreading the wealth.
November 28th, 2010 at 4:31 am
I'm not sure blogging is essential for SEO, but it does help obtain pagerank…
December 2nd, 2010 at 7:45 am
Blog commenting is very important activity in seo point of view as it increases backlink and improving traffic of a website
January 3rd, 2011 at 5:01 am
Really help in back link and small business and try to attract customers too.
January 18th, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Blogging gets some good links, and pagerank too if you know wherre to go blogging!
March 15th, 2011 at 7:54 am
i think blogging is the best way to seo of any of the website because in the blog u r talking about relevant to the keyword and sharing information but in this way, for me its like link farming like u have two sites with different IP addresses and getting inbound links thats not fair idea at any cost.
June 21st, 2011 at 10:19 am
Hi,
Does someone know a way to find some nice ranked blogs where it is relevant to post ??
Cheers