Question: I understand that blogging can have a significant impact on search engine rankings – is this true? If so how does it work , is it do with getting links from the blog to your own site?
Melanie Teesdale, HotGadgets Ltd, Sheffield
Answer:
Blogging is huge, according to some the fastest growing part of the internet. Michael Howard’s wife has started blogging so you know it now must be mainstream.
If you havent done it or don’t know what it is just go to www.blogger.com and follow the 3 step process to set up your own blog.
What is a blog?
According to Blogger.com ‘A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world….
…In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what’s new. Then they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not.’
You’re now reading my blog and I have to say, since having one, my seach engine rankings have improved enormously. Why is this?
SEO and Blogging
There are several reasons it helps, the main one is the one you suggested above. Its a great way of getting an inbound link from a major site (some of you will know an important factor in getting high rankings is getting links to your site from other important and relevant sites – we’ll cover this in detail in a later lesson). You can’t get much bigger and more important than blogger.com – how else are you going to get a site with a Page Rank of 9 linking to your website for free! ( We’ll cover Page Rank later – for now just accept that its a measure of importance on a scale of 1 to 10).
The thing to remember is to always include a link from your blog to your site ( as I do below)….and of course there are other blogging sites you can get links from – blogit, blogwise, bloglines etc. although blogger is best (owned by Google, also known to be good for search)
A word of warning….dont join other people’s blogs, make comments and drop a link to your site habitually just to get these good backlinks – if you do too much of it it’ll be considered as spamming.
Any other reasons its good for search marketing?
Yes, people may find your content on the blog (and then find you )before they find your site. This is because your content on the blog will get higher rankings to similar content on your own site, for the reason above and also for other reasons…good keyword rich content (assuming you are blogging about the same subject matter which exists on your site), good clean code and so on. Ive got oodles of other detail on this subject if you want it – just drop me an email or give me a call (jan@janklin.com ; 01928 788100)
…But most importantly get blogging! Share some of your valuable expertise with the world. Its a good habit to get into and will bring you rewards.
Here’s the all important link back to the main website – its very easy to do as you will see when you set up your blog – (Traffic Builder)
