Lure Search Engines and Customers with a Blog
by: JonathanFP1
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Word Count: 686
The search engines are on a quest: a quest for new content. It’s a case of supply and demand. Every day, there is more demand for new content. Because of this demand, the search engines have been programmed to search out new content. If you can show them that your website is a recurring source of new content, the search engines will hold your website in higher regard. One of the easiest ways to add content to your website is to add a blog to the site.
Creating a blog is easy. Getting it to look like your site and to actually add content to your site rather than adding it under the umbrella of the blogging service is a little tricky, but you can probably manage it. If not, you should be able to find a web design company to do it for you relatively inexpensively. Sites like this one that I found on Google can also help guide you through the process.
The search engine benefits of having a blog on your site far outweigh any initial investment, and certainly are worth the investment of your time each week.
When the search engine first visited your website, they added your pages’ content into their databases. When they return to “crawl” or “spider” your website again, they return with the intention of adding any new content that you’ve added since their last visit. If your site is the same as it ever was, the search engines make a note to return at a longer interval. If they do find new content, such as several new blog entries, they make a note to visit on a regular basis to continue to index the new content. By giving the search engines new content each time they return, you prove to them that your site is a source of new information.
Of course, your blog entries need to be high in quality and keyword relevant. That’s not to say that each post has to be a lengthy, journal-worthy article. It just needs to be something that is worth a human’s time when they visit your site. Feel free to link to other websites, include photos, etc. Changing up the material in your blog will make it more attractive for return visitors, and it will show the search engines that you blog has a variety of information and media to offer. Linking to other sites shows the search engines that you are willing to facilitate “surfing” on the web, and that you aren’t just trying to horde web traffic.
It’s also good to link from your blog entries to the relevant pages of your website. This builds your internal link structure, and points Google and the other search engines to the pages that you consider to be most important to your site.
If you post a lot of quality content to your site on a regular basis, your blog will become an honest-to-goodness resource on the web. Resources that feature information that isn’t available anywhere else on the web will naturally accumulate inbound links. This link popularity is one of Google’s key criteria in evaluating websites. Steadily increasing link popularity can rocket your site past your competition on the search engine results.
All of these things make blogs highly valuable tools for marketing your site on the search engines. It’s important to note that the human factor is the main reason to add a blog to your site. A regularly updated site is much more credible in the eyes of a visitor. As blogging websites like MySpace continue to grow virally in popularity, more and more of your website’s visitors will be savvy web users that understand what a blog is. When they see that you have a blog and that you are dutifully posting on a regular basis, they’ll be impressed. That alone makes blogging worthwhile, but the added search engine benefit is enough in my opinion to make blogging a priority for anyone who is actively marketing their site on the Internet.About the Author
I am an internet marketing consultant at Page 1 Solutions, LLC. You can read more about web marketing on my blog:
http://www.Page1Solutions.com/Blog/Jonathan/
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