The most beneficial blogs are the ones that are either on a subdomain of your website or in a folder under the main domain of your website as visits to these types of blogs count as hits to your website.

Blogs allow you to add regular content to your website, giving you the opportunity to add lots of information about your products, services or brand, and to fill that content with lots of juicy keywords. The majority of your website content will most likely be information about the services or products you provide which is unlikely to receive large amounts of incoming links. Blogs allow you to add articles and information which are unlikely to be included in the regular content of your website, encouraging links that you may not otherwise have received.

Blogs are the easiest way to add regular content to your website. Search engines love to see regular updates, not only can you include keywords in your blog posts you can also show the search engines that your website information is current.

Fresh content on your website encourages regular visits by both readers and search engines, something that is particularly important to your website. Websites with less frequent updates to their content will be visited less by search engines and this may have a negative impact on your search rankings as search engines will constantly be including new data for other, regularly updated websites.

Some people see the measure of a successful search engine optimisation campaign as receiving lots of traffic through the website, but that is not necessarily the case. Attracting quality traffic is the most important thing; blogs are perfect for this because the readers will be searching for the topics you are discussing in your blog. Attracting visitors with an interest in your products or services will encourage repeat visits and, possibly even new enquiries and sales.

Blogs can be categorised in to sections which can include your top keywords as categories. Categorising blog posts makes it easier for search engines to understand your content and make it easier for them to associate your articles with the keywords you want to increase rankings for. Tags work in much the same way, for each blog post, you can add ‘tag’ words or phrases that summarise the post contents, again allowing you to link your relevant keywords to blog posts.

Blog articles are indexed individually by both regular search engines and blog search engines so it is especially important to add your keywords. Well written blog posts that include keywords can rank as highly in search engine results as regular website content.

One of the great things about blogs is that you can add ‘share’ links to the post which encourage your visitors to submit your posts to bookmarking sites such as Digg. Once a link has been shared, other members on the site can vote for posts they like, increasing visibility and traffic. Some of these websites also include incoming links for your website. Blog’s are also good for search engine optimisation because useful or funny blogs are often shared via social networking sites, some of which now have an effect on the rankings of regular websites.

Some blogs also allow for ‘trackbacks’, this allows people who find your blog post useful to continue your discussion and instead of quoting you in their post, they can include a link to your whole post. Trackbacks from websites with good page ranks can also increase the popularity of your web page.

Having a blog that includes an RSS feed is helpful both to your visitors and directories. An RSS feed lets visitors subscribe to your blog via websites such as Google Reader, allowing them to view your latest updates as they are posted. RSS feeds also display your blog post in plain text which is especially useful for search engines because RSS feeds are formatted so that it is easier for computers (and search engines) to understand.

Enabling comments on your blog allows visitors to converse with you and leave their opinions about the subjects you have covered. Allowing, and responding to comments, encourages regular visits and helps to build communities around your blog. Blog comments are also very often a great new source of inspiration for future blog subjects.

Although the effect of blogs on search engine rankings cannot be guaranteed, well written blogs that include relevant information and attract regular traffic can help your website when teamed with search engine optimisation techniques provided by your seo specialists.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

• Don’t change URLs: indexed URLs are precious!! Don’t change them!! Search engines crawl a website and index pages on your website that they then return for relevant search terms. It is alright to change heading, images and other content on the webpage but avoid changing indexed URLs.
• Optimise Website: Apply search engine optimisation to the website before it is launched, not after it’s live and up and running on the internet. Basic SEO techniques can be applied to a website during the build. This also helps to strengthen the information architecture of the website so a user can be led through the website as you planned it. For example, a user may enter a product page and actually be guided through to the information on the product and ultimately the ‘buy now’ webpage, hence changing a visitor into a customer.
• Website Content: for the above to be possible it is important that your website copywriter understands your business and its target audience completely. A good copywriter will write copy for the target audience, speaking their language. Good web copy will also help lead the user to the right web page once a visitor has entered the website.

To find out more of such useful tips contact our web design midlands agency based in Leicester to have an informal chat and see how we can help redesign your website and promote it in Google and other key search engines through SEO.

Mariam Shariff

Studio 2 Online – Web designers Midlands, Leicester

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