To me blogs are a strategic business communication tool. I usually consider the fact that blogs rank high in search engines to be a positive side effect. But I also recognize that for some people search engine optimization, SEO, is a major reason for blogging - and I have found it to be a good reason for others to start thinking about blogging at all. Here's a list of explanations to why your blog probably will rank high in search engines. And it's more to it than just the links.
The links are important, though. Especially to Google. Yahoo and the MSN Beta seems to give content related factors more weight in my experience. But even with Google the key to your success doesn't lie in links alone. If you want traffic through search engines you must get the basics right too.
So, here's my take on why blogs rank high in search engines.
Keywords, key
phrases
Straight to the point
Each post's page structure
Coding
One subject per post
The blog site's information structure
Links then...?
Keywords, key phrases
If I wanted to pick one single reason I would
actually choose this one: In a blog you talk. You engage
in conversations. You think out loud, in a way. The
things you say are (hopefully) everything but the
standard corporate bullxxxx. This means you are filling
the engines' databases with relevant keywords - relevant
because most of us search for the words or phrases we
use daily. The same words you use in the blog because
you talk instead of sending messages to the target
audience.
Straight to the point
How many blog posts have you seen
with this kind of headline: "Our software system
solution for world-wide data quality"? How many
corporate sites have you seen...? This point is related
to the first one but it adds one extra dimension. Not
only do we in blogs speak like real, living people in
the words we use - we say it directly. Straight to the
point. There are certainly exceptions to this, I admit
that. But generally speaking I have found it to be true
in many business blogs. To say what you want to say as
fast as possible is important, which leads me to my next
reason.
Each post's page structure
It's more or less standard in blog
design to use the post's title/headline as the page's
title (together with the blog name). With my two
previous reasons in mind you now see how the html title
is filled with tasty keywords. And that's the most
important place to have them. That's where search
engines expect to find the best clue to what your page
is about, and they rank the words there high in
comparison to other positions in the code. Speaking
about code...
Coding
If you use blog templates they will
probably be an example of good coding. Most I've seen
has been at least. It's often a table-less design, an
extensive use of style sheets, correct coding where
headlines not only are larger and bold but actual H1's,
H2's and so on. It's a clean code - good for browser
compability, good for visitors with disabilities. Good
for search engine spiders. Here you have a potential
risk. If you just use the old CMS templates for your
regular site, you may loose this advantage. The solution
is of course to redesign all of it in line with this
"modern" web design.
Finally, some reasons relating to information structure.
One subject per post
This is all about keyword density,
which is the ratio of the word someone searches for
against the total numbers of words on the web page. Most
blog posts are rather short, and they're often about one
subject. That means a good chance of a high keyword
density - especially if you compare it to a standard
corporate web site where you try to tell about all your
products on one page, or very few pages.
The blog site's information
structure
Blogs are "flat" sites. They have a
first page (level 1), current posts (level 2), about
page (level 2), archive pages (level 2) and archived
posts (level 3). That's it. It's not clear exactly how
important this is. Some claim spiders don't regularly
index very deep sites and that low-level pages are given
lower ranking, others say this is not a factor to care
about.
Links then? Well, they will do you good too. A high Google PageRank is obviously better than a low. But if you don't get the above things right, the PageRank won't mean as much to you as it otherwise would have.
