Blog Benefits: Everyone's Doing It & You Should Be Too

More and more businesses are turning to blogs to help in their web visibility. It is true blogs can provide important search engine relevance and weight, but they are not a silver bullet. They also require diligence in keeping them updated, with original content that's timely and keyword rich.

Before jumping in head first into the blogging world be sure you are committed to the time it will take to keep one updated. Visit blogs of other businesses, join them and monitor their postings. Check out what they are writing about and the tone of their posts. After your research, if you do decide you are up for the challenge in setting up and maintaining your own blog for the long haul, you’ll find there can be many search engine optimization benefits.

This blog post is part of “Your Definitive Guide to Lead Generation” blog series.

why you should blog:

Of course the search engine rules seem to change every month, but the benefits of blogging always stay the same:

1) higher visibility through search engines

• Blogs can be a ferocious SEO Machine and are a valuable tool in any online marketers arsenal. Most blogging platforms have built in assistance to make sure you are making the most of your content. Features such as categories, archives and uniform link structure (with keywords in them) provide not only easy navigation for your site patrons but also search engines. The easier to find your content the easier to rank it!
  Content pillars provide another great way to organize blog content. To learn more, check out this article or one of our very own pillars!

2) blogging could make you an influencer in your field

Blogging provides an easy way for any user to post updated and current content with nothing more exceptional than the ability to log in, type and hit submit, making it friendly to all skill levels in the online and tech world. Plus search engines put a huge amount of weight on CURRENT content, meaning the newer it is (factoring in things like keywords and linking) the higher it will get ranked and the more often your site will be crawled for information. Loads of new, unique and relevant content makes you seem like an authority in your field and gives you an edge as search engines crawl around in your sites.

3) Blogging keeps your visitors engaged

Engagement with your site patrons is a key to keeping their attention. In the online world, you do this by allowing visitors a forum in which to interact with you, your site and your other visitors. Blogs allow commenting and/or content postings by someone other than yourself. This content deposited on your site via other people is also counted as fresh content that can be searched by search engines. It very well can be that your visitors are as knowledgeable as you on the subject and can help you greatly by commenting and advocacy efforts on other sites (that can link back to you).

4) blogs are a great way to spread your message

Syndication by blogs tend to be easily picked up by social news and media websites. Blogs support not only textual information easily but also audio and video, allowing you to have a dynamic tool for getting your message out in any format you or your intended visitors want and need, allowing you to connect to more types of aggregate and specialty sites. The RSS feed-ability of a blog makes your site more attractive to these types of sites due to the ease of reposting your raw content into their own sites’ template with little effort.

The benefits of blogging are so great, you may be itching to start writing one immediatley...But wait! It's not that simple.  Blogs have many best practices that should be followed to make sure you are getting the full value of your blog. Remember, search engines such as google analyze many factors of content when ranking search results.

HERE'S SOME RULES TO FOLLOW FOR PRODUCING OPTIMIZED BLOGS

Ultimately a webpage with unchanging info, although it may be valuable information, may attract one time visitors. A site with a regular input of fresh content will keep the same visitor returning to keep up on your info. A loyal site patron will more than likely become a loyal client.