Blogging & Why You Should Do It

I think its time we address the 800lb Gorilla in the corner -
Blogging. Some of us like to blog, some find it mildly
annoying, some downright detest it and some don’t even know what it is or how to
do it. Whichever category you fall in one thing must remain abundantly clear;
Blogging will drive traffic to your site*. Let me repeat that; Blogging
will drive traffic to your site*. I’ll get to how easy it is for you to
blog in a second, first I want to talk about that asterisk.

Has PageRank Become Obsolete?

Google seemingly changed its own rules this past July when it started to
index pages faster, particularly blogs. Before, a page was given a rank based on
merit such as backlinks for Google to reference, a system called PageRank. To make things quicker the Google System blog states
that ‘Google could use the ping feature of the blog search engine to get
notifications when a site is updated.‘ It doesn’t work for all blogs they
say. That may sound like mumbo jumbo to some so don’t worry if you don’t
understand it. Lets just say ‘Google Sees All.’

There is a lot of speculation as to why Google is doing this. Google’s
position is that it is trying harder to give users better search results. By
providing more relevant content Google can better serve its client base. Others
are talking about Technorati’s influence on blog search and Wikipedia’s user
generated content pulling in a lot of search results. There’s no shortage of
ideas on why they are doing what they are doing. We’ll let them figure that out,
for now you need to leverage this change in protocol.

Your Site and Your Blog

The biggest reason to start blogging is to leverage this recent change. Your
site may be new and not getting indexed as fast as you would like. By blogging
you are speeding up the process but you need to do it correctly in order to
succeed. If you create a blog and brand it ‘Company Blog’ you need to be able to
tell the search engines that this new blog is associated with your company. It
may have the same colours and logo but search engines don’t really care about
that stuff, they can’t see it. What they are looking for is a relationship and
the way they find that is through your content. Your content should direct
readers back to your site. This is very easy to do; link keywords in your blog
posts to sections on your site. If you have a post about Widget A link the
widget name to your widget page on your site. This associates your blog to your
site – one way. You’ll need to link from your site to your blog to complete the
relationship. Google doesn’t like one way streets.

We always sign off on every blog post we do on this blog with links to our Search Engine Marketing page
on Schipul.com. This
associates our keywords with our blog and site. Using this tactic we have been
able to take a new unranked site to a PageRank of 6 in a very short time.

Tips & Tricks for Successful Blogging

As with any site your blog should be optimized so people can find you. We
tell our clients to use direct headline tags with keywords and blogs are no
different. If you sell a widget and the widget has a benefit label your blog
post ‘Benefits of Widget.’ By using your keywords in your
headlines you are telling Google that this information is important. Google uses
real time search queries on particular topics to display
results. Knowing that you should use titles that not only grab the attention of
the search engines but also readers eyes. Think of blogging and websites as a
newspaper. You want to get the message out and you need to get people to read -
make it concise and to the point.

Remember you are trying to drive traffic to your site by creating a
relationship with your site and your blog. You should be passionate about it. If
you aren’t then save your self some time and try something else like
Pay-per-Click

I’ll show you how easy it is to blog in the next post

UPDATE

Our first blog post
from an hour or so ago is now indexed on Google

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul -
sem@schipul.com

Related posts from the Schipul SEM Team:

1. SEO Checklist for New Blog Posts