Blogging for SEO

There certainly is a lot of traction lately regarding blogging to help increase your ranking, so what is our take on it? As always, it depends on your situation, and your willingness to make it work for you.

Those pesky search engines sure do love to slurp up new content. And if you become identified as a source for new, focused and relevant content, then yes - it's going to help you out a lot. But this is where I the 'it depends' part comes in. The fact that I've included the words 'Focused' and 'Relevant' in that sentence are also key. Search Engines love new, fresh content - true. But more importantly, they love focused, relevant content. If you were to have a web site dedicated to hammers, and spent all your time blogging about cat food - well, you're not focused. And if you can't figure out how to tie in Hammers to Cat Food - then you're not relevant either. This isn't to say that you won't achieve some notoriety for this, but since you're supposed to be blogging to increase your SEO, so you're off track :)

What about frequency? Big-time important here. If you're not blogging every day (or at least 5 times a week) then you're not blogging. Your content must be updated very regularly in order to get any sort of bonus from it. So - if you're going to try to blog to increase your Search Engine Ranking, then do it often. Otherwise, you're just making new web site content. Which isn't bad - it's just not what we're trying to look at here.

While we're on the subject, here's a tip the regarding the Search Engine Optimization of the blog itself: Link to your own site! Use your blog to point to other, deeper links within your site (as I've done here with SEO and Search Engine Optimization). These links (when relevant) are going to help your own content become more relevant and will increase your chances of a better page rank. And remember to use the Keywords in your links, and matching keywords in the title of your page and the first and last sentence of the content.

So, to sum it up: Blogging for SEO is a great idea, but you must be dedicated to making it work. As with just about anything, success is neither free nor guaranteed - but everything you can do to help is worth it.

And of course, if you have any questions, please feel free to let us know!