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?