9 Reasons Blogs Are Great For SEO

While blogging is not the answer for all websites, it can greatly benefit the majority of sites and businesses regardless of industry. If your website struggles to have the impact for your business that you would like it to have, take a look at what a blog can do for your website’s search engine optimization (SEO).

The Strongest Search Engine Optimization Benefits of Blogging

Here are 9 reasons why blogs are great for SEO:

1. More Content on the Site

For small to medium-sized websites, if you add a blog to your existing site and publish an average of one new post per week you will be significantly increasing the amount of content and the number of pages that are on your site. If each blog post attracts a small number of search traffic on a consistent basis, over a period of time you will see a significant increase in overall search traffic.

Of course, you will wind up with some blog posts that attract more search engine traffic than others, but with a greater amount of quality content on the site, you will be in a much better position. The more content you have on your site, the better chance you have of matching someone’s search query.

2. Inbound Links

One of the most important factors in determining search engine rankings is the quality and quantity of inbound links. An inbound link is when another website links to a page on your site. Blogs are great for attracting links because bloggers tend to link to a lot of other blogs in their posts. If you publish interesting, unique content, other bloggers in your niche will notice and start linking to your posts.

Blogs also present opportunities for building links through link exchanges. While link exchanges are not beneficial in mass (trading links with thousands of other sites), when used within reason, they can be very positive for search engine rankings. Many bloggers include a blogroll or friends list in their sidebar. Frequently these links are part of a link exchange.

3. Fresh Content

Search engines like to see new and fresh content on a site, and in some situations this content may even receive a boost in search engine rankings because it is new. By maintaining an active blog you will always have a site that is fresh, and increased search engine traffic can be one of the rewards.

Without a blog, it is unlikely that a site will be frequently updated with new content being added. The ease of adding new content with a blog and the fact that there will be an audience waiting for new content will likely lead to a website that is much more fresh than it would be without a blog.

4. Longtail Keywords Can Be Targeted with Individual Posts

Part of the SEO process is identifying keywords and phrases that you want to target. Longtail phrases refer to multi-word phrases that have lower search volume than shorter, more common search phrases. By targeting longtail phrases, you will have less competition for the top spots in search rankings. Blogs are great for attracting search traffic from a wide variety of search phrases because each blog post can target its own search phrase.

With a small website, you may be targeting one or two search phrases for the home page, and maybe there are a few other pages on the site that are optimized for other search phrases. With a blog, there is no limit to how many longtail phrases you can target. Most blogs draw the majority of their search traffic to individual posts, not to the blog front page.

5. Blogs Combine with Social Media for Huge Link Building Potential

We already looked at the subject of link building, but social media marketing opens up even more possibilities. Social media sites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and many more present excellent opportunities for promoting your blog posts and attracting links. By submitting your posts to social media sites (or when your readers submit your posts to these sites), you’ll get a link from that social media site (although some use nofollow tags). But more importantly, if your posts becomes popular and attracts a lot of attention through social media, it’s likely that many other bloggers will find that content and link to it.

While it is possible to use social media to market a website without a blog, it doesn’t work nearly as well and it’s harder for social media users to interact with a website once they arrive. Adding a blog, producing quality content, and doing some marketing on appropriate social media sites can go a long way in your link building efforts.

6. Quick Indexing

Several years ago, submitting a site to search engines was something that needed to be done when the site was launched or when new content was added. With blogs (and also with XML sitemaps), there is no need to submit your content to search engines in order to get it included in their index. Each time you publish a blog post your blogging engine (i.e. WordPress) will send a ping to the search engines to let them know about the content. It’s possible that the content will be indexed and appear in search results in an hour or less.

7. Internal Linking Opportunities

While inbound links from other sites are important for search engine rankings, internal links can also help. Internal links (links from one page of your site to another page within the same site) will help to make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl through your site, and they’ll also use these links to determine what content is most important on your site. Internal links can also be helpful because you control the anchor text that is used and you can link to specific pages/posts using keywords in the anchor text.

As a blog grows and more content is added, internal links become an important part of usability, making it easier for visitors to find the right content. Internal links will typically happen naturally with a blog, and this can be an added bonus for SEO.

8. Comments Can Draw Search Traffic

It’s not uncommon for me to do a Google search and find a page that will appear in the search results that will be there because of something that has been left in the comments section of  a blog post. Any content that your readers leave on your posts can also potentially help that particular blog post appear in the search results. While this is certainly not a primary reason for blogging and it’s not one of the most significant SEO benefits, it can result in a small boost in search traffic.

9. Easy Experimentation

As I mentioned earlier, each blog post can target a different search phrase. Consequently, this makes it easy to experiment. If you wanted to change your site (home page in particular) to be optimized for a different word or phrase, it would take a lot of effort to change the content, page titles, anchor text on internal links, and to build links with the newly targeted word or phrase in the anchor text; however, with a blog, you can simply create a new post that targets that word or phrase. You can try a lot of different things to see what gets results and what doesn’t, without wasting huge amounts of time.

What’s Your Experience?

Have you personally or professionally experienced the SEO benefits of using a blog? If so, feel free to share your experience and thoughts in the comments.

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Steven Snell is a web designer and freelance blogger. He maintains Blog Design Heroes, a gallery that showcases examples of well-designed blogs.

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