Do Outside Blogs Help Your Websites Search Engine Rankings?

One of the questions we get quite often around here is "Does having a blog for my company help my search engine rankings?"

My answer is Yes- a blog can absolutely help your search engine rankings. With that said let me be clear- Manipulation of search rankings is not the reason to start a blog. I know what your thinking, "Jon, you just totally contradicted yourself". Let me explain: 

If your going to do a blog it needs to be a good blog with valuable content that is related to your core business.

By design blogs do a lot of things very well and when used regularly and correctly can help you earn better search engine rankings. In fact setting up a blog on a different domain like .blogger.com or .wordpress.com can often achieve rankings faster than a brand new websites. Here is why- AGE - Most search engine experts agree that the longer your domain has been registered the better it will rank. When you set up a blog using a subdomain like .wordpress.com or .blogger.com (Two sites that have been in existence for a long time) and age of your blog's domain makes Google Happy!

Here are a few more reasons to start a blog for your business:

• Blogs invite user comment which essentially keeps content fresh and fresh content makes Google Happy.
  
• Blogs are often easier to publish to than a regular website, so you can post content to it more often and fresh content makes Google Happy.
  
• A blog is a great place to post content that is related to your business but just doesn't quite fit into the professional nature of your website and this type of related content that links to your website makes Google Happy.
  
  Note- When creating a new blog post, be sure that the content in the post offers valuable content. If your blog post is realted to a service or product your company provides link to that product or service from your blog post. This is one of the biggest benefits of a blog. You can generate good related content and link it to your site. The other obivous benifit is that your blog can send your website visitors. Remember, people will be more likley to click on the links in your blog if your blog offers value. 

The bottom line is a good blog with links to your site can and will improve your link popularity, which in turn will boost your search engine rankings and that makes your bosses happy!

Here a great resources on increasing blog traffic:

• 21 Tactics To Increase Blog Traffic