You may be thinking that you don’t have any need for blogging, or that the time it takes to write a post would outweigh any potential reward. Although there are certainly many ways to blog, a little can go a long way, and if you play your cards right, you’ll see that even a small amount of blogging effort can yield some great search engine results.
1. Google rewards freshness. With Google’s most recent algorithm changes, fresh, continually updated content will rank higher than sites whose content never changes. In other words, simply putting something new on your site (like a blog post) will help boost your rankings.
2. Internal links will strengthen your SEO. When you create blog posts that touch on topics from previous blog posts, you can create internal links to your other content. The benefit of this is twofold: one, it keeps visitors on your site for longer; two, it creates a network of keywords that strengthen your ranking.
3. You control the anchor text. When creating your internal links, you get to decide what anchor text to use, which means you don’t have to worry about whether someone is using a mostly useless “click here” anchor. You can never fully control what’s on other sites, but you can certainly control your own, and the better you can make your anchor text, the stronger your search rankings will be.
4. External links always help, too. Linking to important sites in your niche is always going to help your SEO, by associating you with important and trusted names in your field. Likewise, one-way links help you seem more credible as people who run in your circles start to use you as a reference, or quote your posts in their own blogs.
5. Blog posts are seeds for social media attention. When you post quality, interesting content and share it on your networks, every single post has a chance at snowballing. They don’t have to be long posts, either – in fact, for the Twitter and Facebook crowd, short and sweet is ofter a better recipe for increased attention. Keep your posts catchy and short, and most of all, provide useful content that people will want to share with others.
Does your website have a blog? How much effort do you spend making sure your blog is helping your search rankings?
