You’ve probably heard a million things about blogs. You might not know exactly what to do with a blog, but you do know that the growing consensus among marketers is that you must start a blog if you want to drive more traffic to your website.
In the past, blogs were used primarily for personal reasons. For instance, Myspace, Livejournal, and other social networking blog systems allow users to quickly post daily happenings on their own blogs and comments on their friends blogs.
Additionally, blogs are now being used by website owners as an additional means of search engine optimization. But why is the blog so effective for SEO?
There are three primary reasons …
1. A blog allows you to update your site quickly and easily. The more you update, the fresher your content is, which results in higher search engine algorithm ranking scores. Additionally, fresh content brings in repeat visitors, who post comments regularly and increase the amount and frequency of content generation.
2. A blog allows you to “ping” directories, rather than hand-submitting. If you’ve ever hand-submitted your site information to dozens of directories, you know how irritating this can be. If you use a blog, you can simply submit your blog URL and title to kping.com This will then send an updated version of your blog to 30 or so blog directories. Some of these directories will list blogs according to when they’ve last been updated. This means that you will be on the front page of a high-ranking directory every
time you blog and ping.
3. A blog allows you to syndicate your content easily. By setting up an RSS feed, you instantly allow other webmasters to link to your website without any real effort. In fact, people using feed aggregators may link to your blog without even doing it intentionally.
Each of these three benefits also has an additional benefit: they each decrease the amount of time it takes to get indexed in the search engines. If an authority site uses an RSS feed aggregator that pulls your blog’s RSS feed, when that site gets spidered, the search engine spider will find your site and index it.
The same is true for large blog directories, which are indexed daily. If you blog and ping frequently, your site will frequently get updated.
Additionally, there are two other important secrets to using a blog effectively. The first is to subscribe to your own RSS feeds using your Yahoo and MSN accounts. This will get your feeds spidered by search engines faster.
Another secret to using your blog effectively is searching for similar blogs that allow you to make comments – and then posting on them with a signature . It is crucial that you actually contribute to the discussion.
If you post insightful comments on a number of large blogs; you will not only gain a number of good inbound links to your blog, but you will also be able to drive traffic to your site without too much additional effort.
Now that we’ve covered on page optimization, off page optimization, and blogs, we will briefly cover forums, which are an important means of recycling traffic…