Is A Blog Good For Your Website?

What Can A Blog Do For You?

Blogs are one of the most powerful marketing tools to come along in many a year. The more I work with them, the more impressed I am. Case in point: a client's site just received a one-way, unrequested link to their site (to the blog page in fact) from a major, and I mean major, university. Why is this important? Because backlinks to your site, from authoritative sites in your field, are the lifeblood of your internet marketing. With Google shutting down so many of the old avenues used to get links (reciprocal links, for one thing) the ability to get valuable links to your site is a precious commodity.

Feeding The Monster

There are two things that are needed, above all, to rank well in Google these days. (And it works for Yahoo! and MSN also). Those two things are content and backlinks. (Links to your site.) The content must be original and useful, and it really helps if it gets updated frequently. That's where a blog comes in. If it is placed as a top level page in your site, it offers an easy way to update your content, and to get that update indexed by the search engines. This is what I mean by "feeding the monster." And of course, the more you feed the monster, the more likely you are to gain valuable links. So the two key ingredients for search engine success, great content and great links, actually go hand-in-hand.

Beaming Your Blog To The Search Engines

More so than in the case of getting a website indexed by search engines, it is relatively simple to get your blog indexed in the major search engines devoted to blogs. You can simply enter the url of your blog at one of the blog "pinging" sites, select your chosen search engines, and the pinging service "pings" the search engines and lets them know when your blog is updated. Within hours, your new blog post, complete with keywords, is beamed out across the relevant media. Several pinging services have worked well for us, including PingOat.com and Pings.ws

How To See Who Is Linking To Your Blog

A great new metasearch engine is called TalkDigger.com. It's an advanced search engine that searches both regular and blog search engines, so you can find out where your blog is being discussed, showing up in other blogs, or as indicated above, gaining links on important web sites.