Reasons You Should Have A Blog

This article gives six good reasons you should have a blog on your website from a SEO point of view.

Before we go to these reasons lets go over what gives a website higher rankings in the search engines.

a) lots of content — lots of human developed content of good quality that is relevant to the theme of your website will help you with your rankings. I will explain why this is in my first of six reasons you should have a blog on your website

b) on-page optimization — putting the key phrase you are targeting in the URL, page title tag, meta description tag, meta keywords tag, h1/h2/h3 tags, bold in the first paragraph, and discussing the key phrase in your content.

c) off-page optimization — inbound links from other sites with the key phrase you are targeting in the anchor text pointed at inside pages on your website that are have op-page optimization for that key phrase.

d) high site authority — this has to do with how the search engines view your website, how old the domain is, having your main key phrase in your domain name, how many pages on your site, how old the pages are, where your site is in DMOZ directory, the number and quality of inbound links from other sites.

Better rankings drive traffic to your website and then you can monetize the traffic and make money. You monetize your traffic by selling your services or products, or moving your traffic to affiliate sites, or by putting Google AdSense on your site.

Okay lets go over the six points.

Six Reasons You Should Have A Blog

1. More Content Overall Gives Higher Rankings — lots of human developed content of good quality that is relevant to the theme of your website will help you with your rankings. A blog is a easy way to product lots of content.

All things being equal the search engines will give a site with 1000 pages better ranking than a site with one page. There are two reasons for this.

The first reason is the more pages you have the more pages that will have high on-page optimization for the key phrase each page is optimized for. That means you will ranking higher for many key phrases based on on-page optimization. On one page you can really only optimize the page for one key phrase. With ten pages you can really only optimization those pages for ten key phrases. So the more pages you have the more key phrases you will have good on-page optimization for and the better rankings you will get.

The second reason is search engines consider websites with lots of content to be offering more information to the search engine user. While search engines consider many other things at the same time, all things being equal a website with 1000’s of pages is going to be considered of more value than a website with one to ten pages.

2. High Ranking For Each Blog Article — for each blog article you post you select a key phrase that your website can rank for. How competitive the key phrase you used depends on the site authority your website has as you are only using on-page optimization to rank for the key phrase. If you have high site authority you can use very competitive key phrases. If you site is newer and doesn’t have a lot of site authority you will need to target less competitive key phrases.

For this article I selected the key phrase “Reasons You Should Have A Blog”. You will notice that this phrase is in the URL, in the page title tag, in h2/h3 tags, in bold and italic at the beginning of the content, and in the meta description. If you Google up Reasons You Should Have A Blog you will notice I ranking around #14. That rankings is obtained by on-page optimization and the site authority that this website has.

Perhaps later I will show you how to drive it to the first page by doing some simple link building.

When your blog articles rank in the top SERP (search engine results page) searchers will click through and visit your site. This will bring some traffic from each blog article and then you can monetize that traffic by selling products, moving your traffic to affiliate sites, or by putting Google AdSense on your site.

3. Searchers Come Back If They Find Quality Content — if you blog often and when you blog you write quality articles your visitors will bookmark your blog and come back. Or even better, they will link to your blog and talk about it. Inbound links (off-page optimization) is one of the main things that causes your site to rank high.

If you were just adding article to your articles page your visitors wouldn’t come back as often as they will for a blog as people expect fresh daily or weekly content on a blog. That’s brings up another point — blog often or your readership will drop off. When you readership drops off so does your rankings as the links that people give you drop off.

4. Blogs Automatically Ping Search Engines When You Post — you can set up your blogging software to ping the search engines and let them know you have fresh content. This way the your blog pages will get into the search engine faster and rank sooner. The blog articles on More Christ Like Blog get picked up by Google with in 5 minutes and are ranking with in 15 minutes.

5. Blog Software Automatically Produces Highly Optimized Pages — I highly recommend WordPress blogging software. It is easy to install and has lots of quality free blog designs. It also can be set up so that the key phrase that you put in your blog title becomes the URL, page title tag, in the h1 tag, at the beginning of the meta description, and you can easily bold it in the first paragraph.

6. Invite Other Bloggers To Review Posts In Your Blog Comments — getting links from other blogs to your blog transfer ranking juice, especially if the key phrase you are targeting is put in the anchor text of the inbound link.

While I don’t advocate doing comment spam, if you have a blog article and you leave a quality comment on a relevant post of another blog, engaging the blogger concerning the content of their article, I think it is fine to link back to your relevant article and ask them to read it and leave comments.

Changing your comment name to the key phrase you are targeting is considered spammy and typically I remove the link URL when people do this on my blog. Put the name of your blog in the comment name (in my case I put More Christ Like Blog) and then if you have engaged the blogger and given them feedback on their post there is nothing wrong with doing a link drop back to the article on your blog that deals with the same subject.

Blog software provides the ability of your readership to make comments on your articles. Not only does this facilitate getting inbound links from leaving comments in other blogs by inviting them to post a comment on your article but in general this engages your readership and allows them give you feedback.

The above six reasons are based on traffic and are written from a SEO stand point of view. Here are some other quality posts that give other reasons to blog.

Sites that Ranked Well for the Key Phrase “Reasons You Should Have A Blog”
–Why You Should Blog by Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz BLog.
–7 Reasons You Should Have a Business Blog by Mark White from BT Business Blog.
–10 reasons why you should blog? by Arun Prabhudesai from Trak.in India Business Blog.
–19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet by Adam Singer from Future Buzz Blog.
–Five reasons why you should have a blog by now by George Murphy from Maryland SEO.
–Three Reasons You Should Blog; One Reason You Shouldn’t by August Ash.
–10 Reasons you should have a business blog by Simon Jones from ecademy.