Why a blog is important for SEO
6th September 2013
SEO & Marketing

Why a blog is important for SEO

Here at Digital Developments we always encourage our clients to include a blog in their new website. There is a good reason for this and most clients end up getting one built into their site, however a lot of the time they fail to use it to it’s capacity. A blog can be a very handy tool in increasing your search engine rankings.

Hang on… a blog?

A blog (or web log) is basically just a group of articles or news within a website. Each blog article can contain anything from general text to different types of media such as images and video. When we add a blog module into your website, it allows you to add an unlimited number of articles and group them into different categories.

What do I ‘blog’ about?

I suppose it depends on the business you are in but the general idea of a blog is to create interest in your website and develop a following of users who like to read and share your content.

You have complete freedom into what you want to put in your articles, however generally you want to publish unique content that customers find interesting, useful and would more than likely share with friends.

Some examples of the type of things you can write about are:

  • Hints and tips about a particular subject relating to your business.
  • News relating to your industry
  • Internal news relating to your business

How is this good for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?

There are a plethora of ways that a blog will benefit you in relation to search engine rankings, however the main reasons are as follows:

Freshness
Search engines, including Google, love websites that are constantly changing and developing and at the end of the day their job is to show the listings that will best benefit the user based on what they search for.  While it is good to update your sites content regularly, a blog allows you to constantly add new and relevant information to your website. A website that never changes will most likely have old, out of date content.

A few important notes:

  • You articles must be unique. This means that you can’t just copy text and information from another website into your articles to keep your site fresh. You will actually get penalised for this.
  • It is best to make your articles relavent to the industry that you are in. There isn’t much point writing about footy on a website about computers.
  • One of the most important things is to write articles for the benefit of users and not purely for SEO. This means don’t write articles just for the sake of writing articles, search engines are smart and they know if you are trying to deceive them.

Social Media
Adding new articles all the times allows a stronger integration into social media. This is important, because search engines are more than ever using social media as a form of crowd validation that the content on the website is popular and relevant for the users. If search engines see that a lot of people are clicking from social media to articles it believes that the content or information must be useful to the user.

This also allows you to promote your business in a less intrusive manner. Most people don’t like the ‘hard sell’ on social media and are more likely going to click on an article with some handy information than something with a ‘Buy our products now’ philosophy.

When developing a blog for you we make sure that all the social media tools are included to allow users to share and interact with your articles.

Keeping users on your site
Search engines can track how long users stay on your your website and it uses this data in it’s rankings. It makes sense that if users don’t stay on a website long, it generally means that they haven’t found what they are looking for. Adding interesting articles, particularly with embedded videos, are a great way to keep users on your website for a long time.

We provide the functionality to easily include videos within articles as well as a related articles section within each article to keep users interested in your blog.

Creating authorship
I have written a full article explaining Google Authorship, but in a nutshell, Google is attempting to rank articles based on the authors reputation. If you write articles that are consistently popular, you will are more likely to be ranked ahead of someone who spams articles they have more than likely ripped off another site.

We can help you setup Google Authorship using your blog so you can start building your reputation as a content writer.

Conclusion

Unfortunately there isn’t a magical button that will shoot you to the top of the Google rankings overnight, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get on the first page. This is usually why businesses employee SEO companies, however a blog is a great way to boost your rankings and best of all you can do it yourself!