We’re asked often about the use and popularity of blogs, and if you look closely, you will see that virtually every one of the sites we build has a blog as an integral part of it. The SEO benefits of having a blog as a part of your web site are enormous. In fact, you are reading a blog post now and our sister site, www.kisscomputing.com, also has a blog – - The Tao of Kiss.

Blogs are pure content, and as you have read on these pages often before, content is still king on the Internet. Content growth and content refreshing are two of the practices we recommend to every one of our clients, and with good reason.

Search engines reward the growth of content on a site, and why wouldn’t they?  More content, well planned and regularly added, keeps a site dynamic and interesting for its visitors.  Take a moment and read the Webmaster Guidelines at Google, and you will find the strongest of recommendations that sites be made user friendly with helpful content.

Reviewing your site’s performance, and staying abreast of Internet user search habits, help you identify keywords, especially of the long-tail variety, that your potential customers are using in searches you want to be found for, and refreshing your content puts you in front of their eyes.  Blogs can help you do that.

They are as easy to manage and write to as emails are to write and send.  Blog systems will have a password-protected back end, and a rich text editor that works very much like MS Word or Open Office Word.  Anyone familiar with email sending can write to a blog.

Writing for a blog is not something to be intimidated by, either.  We tell clients what they write is not as important that they write, and since we assume you know your business and your products and your services, writing about them should come easy to you.  Blog systems even have spell-checking, so there’s no excuse for misspelled words, either.

All of that having been said, take a step back and look again at what you are reading and where.  We customized the blog system and seamlessly integrated it into our web site.  We added an excerpt feed from it to the home page of our site, too.

Every time we write a new blog post, like this column, the content of our site has grown.  And, because of the excerpt feed to the home page, every time we write a new blog post, the content on our home page gets refreshed.

Now, look even closer.  One of the services we offer is search engine optimisation, writing content for a client’s site optimised for the most appropriate keywords, all designed to improve search engine rank position for those keywords.  SEO is our business, and one of the better tools for SEO best practices is a blog.

See the title of this blog post?  “The SEO Benefits of a Blog.” See the first paragraph of this blog post?  “The SEO benefits of having a blog . . . ” are included in the excerpt feed to the home page of our web site.

Having a blog as a part of your web site gives you the ability to grow the content of your site, introduce and increase the keywords that are the most appropriate for your business, and refresh the content of your home page.  These all represent search engine optimisation best practices, and help improve your search engine rank position.

That’s why we recommend a blog to every one of our clients.  As you have seen, we also follow our own advice.

Tags: blogs, search engine optimisation, SEO

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Web Copywriting/SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.