Ironvine Search Marketing

Came across a good post about the SEO benefits of blogs which has a lot of good reasoning behind why you should have or incorporate one into your personal or business site. Most of the things I agree with in here are sound principles, but there are a few opinions about how effective they are I would tend to argue.

Honestly most of the comments in the article are true, but it can depend on the site you are applying it to, or the content type. The responses to the article I agree with as well, there are definitely points you can argue.

Some of the reasons why you should use or create a blog include:

1. Structured content - Blog software with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to algorithmically categorize content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.
2. Crawlable URLs - Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.
3. Internal links - Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long tail phrases.
4. Inbound link magnet - One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other - much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, thus encouraging links and traffic.
5. RSS - Links to RSS feed urls that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
6. Fresh content - Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.
7. Active community - Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.
8. Non-Search traffic - I think the greatest benefit of having an active blog has little to do with improving your search engine rankings though. The best thing about blogs is that they allow you to generate substantial amounts of traffic via RSS and links that have NOTHING to do with search engines. My recommendation to marketers in 2007 is to pursue traffic alternatives to search engines as aggressively as their budgets and marketing programs will allow. The result will be incremental increases in site traffic with search engine referred traffic an added bonus, if not correspondingly enhanced.

Have a read through the full article here. This is a pretty basic list of reasons why and how a blog can be beneficial to a site and promote your web traffic.

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