Blogs are one of the best SEO tools available

 – posted August 17th, 2006 by Laurence Veale     Comments (2)

Tom Raftery, the Cork-based podcaster and blogger,posted recently on Blogs and Search engine optimisation. Tom thinks that blogs are one of the best SEO tools around and we definitely agree. But should they be used primarily as an SEO tool? We don’t think so.

Why do search engines love blogs?

Search engines love blogs and individual blog posts for a number of reasons

  • blogs are content-rich
  • blogs are link-rich
  • blogs are frequently updated
  • blogs (should) have readable URLs

Blogs are content-rich

Generally speaking blogs exist as a means of communicating to an audience. People come to read, be informed and interact. If content is well written and fresh, then you’ve got a readership.

Blogs are link-rich

Blogs are full of internal and external links and guess what? Search engines love links. In fact, it’s one of the primary factors in how Google’s PageRank is calculated, i.e. the number of sites that link to yours is essentially a vote for your site. On this post, I’ve essentially voted for Tom Raftery and Brian Donohue, so potentially adding to their importance in search engine rankings

Blogs are frequently updated

By and large, blogs are frequently updated and search engines love fresh content. Search engines rate fresh content highly because people are mostly looking for up to date information. It’s that simple. The goal of the search engine is to give people accurate up to date results.

Blogs have readable URLs

Another important aspect of blogs that attract the search engines is unique and human-readable URLs (web address). For example, Brian’s recent post on the NY Times’ Most Popular List ends with
/why-i-love-the-ny-times-most-popular-list
which to search engines and indeed, humans, is far more readable than something like
page.aspx?article=24646&session_id=2134213423cacc

Content is still king

Content has always been king, even more so now with blogs. Writing good content is key to your readers and also to search engine optimisation. Content should be well structured, headings should be meaningful and link text should be well written and relevant, and last of all content should be marked up using semantic HTML. Without good content blogs are pointless.

The important thing to remember, that the goal of blogging is not in itself to improve your search engine rankings, but to provide compelling content that your visitors will actually read and perhaps even blog about themselves.

iQ Bootcamp: learn more on SEO, blogging and writing good content

In our October bootcamp, we’ll be talking about how to drive more traffic to your website including blogging as one of many SEO tools. Also in our bootcamp programme, we’ll be running a writing for the web workshop.

Categories Blogs and Blogging, Content, Search Engine Optimisation

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