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In today's marketplace, incorporating a
blog for your company's website is a critical component of
an effective search engine marketing campaign.
Blogs are website content management systems with additional
functionality such as comments, trackbacks, and really
simply syndication (RSS). At East Coast
Internet, we have developed and marketed blogs for many of
our business clients including lawyers and other
professionals.
The benefits of incorporating a blog for search engine
marketing purposes include:
1.
Structured content
- Blog software with category features allows the aggregation of
content according to themes. This makes it easier for search
engines to understand your content, and hence 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 website.
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
- Perhaps one of the greatest benefits 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. At East Coast Internet,
we recommend that our clients 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.
Want to find out more about our blog
marketing services?
Contact one of our Internet
marketing consultants today |
