For those of you who don’t know what a blog is, take a minute to read our article what is a blog?

Along with social media, blogs have become a way of keeping people updated and letting them interact with your business. Although they can seem like a lot of work, there is often a good return on this investment in time, even for the most unlikely websites.

By keeping an up to date blog you can communicate with customers, give them an opportunity to provide feedback and also help broaden your reach in the search engines. Covered below are some of the main ways in which a blog can help your website.

Crawl rate

A blog will provide your website with a section that is regularly updated with fresh content, which search engines love, and can help increase the overall crawl rate of the main website also.

Long Tail Keywords

More blog posts mean more pages. With more pages comes more of an opportunity to target different keywords in the search results. By writing a blog posts about a specific topic, e.g. a new product release, you are also giving the website an opportunity to rank on terms relevant to the product. This can be a very effective method of driving targeted traffic to the website, think about the amount of people that will look for reviews/specifications of products online before buying them. If you can provide this information for them you are one step closer to converting them into a sale.

Links

Links are an important part of SEO. Having a blog helps to get your website involved in the online community focused around your product or service. If you can get referenced on other relevant and authoritative websites, this will usually mean a link to your website or page.

Customer Interaction

If you provide relevant and regularly updated content, not only do the search engines love it, but you will attract people who have an interest in your product or service. Although these people may not be direct customers, the influence they can have on your business both online and offline can be huge. By also offering customers the opportunity to interact with you via the comments on the blog you can gain a lot of valuable information about your product or service.

It may still seem like it is a lot of effort to integrate and maintain a blog on your website, but if traffic helps your business grow it’s definitely worth it. Setting up a blog shouldn’t be too difficult depending on what you want to do, you can either integrate a blog into your website like ours, or you can use a free or paid blog hosting service. There are pros and cons to each depending on how you are going to best use the service.

On their blog post they mention that they have received complaints from three different companies, which it lists as Ciao! from Microsoft, ejustice.fr and UK price comparison site Foundem.

In essence the complaints claim that these websites rankings are demoted intentionally by Google’s algorithm due to the fact they are direct competitors. In the post Google claims this is not the case and that other vertical search engines such as Moneysupermarket typically rank well in the search results.

With pretty much all of Google’s revenue coming from paid search advertising services this is a situation they could do without, but this isn’t the first time Google has been confronted with similar allegations and by now they’re probably getting used to it.

The latest move is yet another step by search engines to increase the relevancy of results by providing users with real time search helping to strike a balance between up to date results and older ones from more informative sources.

Here’s the image taken from the Yahoo Blog flikr page

Although this won’t be visible on all searches just yet, over the coming months we should see Twitter integration becoming more common in the search results.