Blogging - a great SEO tool

You can look at a blog from several perspectives. For most people, it is just a simple self-expression method, others see it as a discussion forum. However, if you look at a blog not only as all of the above but also as a SEO tool, your handling of the blog will change. How you write your posts will change. How you think about your blog will change. You'll then be able to derive great business value from your blog.

Search engine optimization, in a nutshell, involves anything that improves your ratings in the popular search engines, like Google, MSN & Yahoo. The higher your ranking, the greater the chance that a new customer will see your site in the first page of search engine outputs. While you can improve the structure and linking of your site by practicing techniques of on-line and off-line optimization, such as adding meta-tags and sitemaps, you need other methods to increase the popularity of your site.

Blogging is one such method. Blogs traditionally have a large number of posts on them that relate to a specific subject. Readers who are interested will come to the blog, reading, and leave feedback and comments. If you promote your blog actively, you will also visit the blogs of your readers, and leave comments on their sites along with a link back to your blog. Can you see how the blog is beginning to behave like a SEO tool?

Two things happen if you handle this well – your blog gets lots of keyword rich content and it gets a lot of links to itself from other sites. Either way, your business gains.

Search engines love keyword rich content and inbound links. While traditional SEO tools do this by making you manage links to other sites and increase or optimize keyword usage, your blog is doing this in the most natural way and gives you a great big, ready-made user base!

Of course, before your blog does become your SEO tool of choice, there is a lot of work to be done. You will not be able to build the niche you are looking for if you do not focus completely on the quality of your blog. This means that your content has to be great and the better than average informed reader still has to find something worth reading on your blog.

While keeping a blog can be a great satisfaction in itself, there are many business related benefits to keeping one. A good blog is a natural SEO tool that attracts traffic to your site in the most natural way.