Is Blogging Good Search Engine Optimization?

by Nick Stamoulis

So you’ve decided that you need to start a blog. Everyone else has one. The competition has two. You think they’re cool (now that you know what they are) and you’d like to start one. Is it good for Search Engine Optimization?

The real answer is, Yes, blogging is good for Search Engine Optimization - if you do it right. If you don’t do it right then it can water down your Search Engine Optimization. Here’s what I mean.
First, the two types of blogs for Search Engine Optimization: On Site and Off Site.

You can put a blog on the same domain name as your website and build your search engine saturation. That means the number of pages you have indexed at the search engines and potentially ranking for your keywords. Every blog post is a separate web page to the search engines so after you’ve written one year’s worth of blog posts (assuming you blog every day), you now have 365 additional web pages. But are they optimized?

With this type of blog, you have to use keywords, alt tags, anchor text, and other SEO elements in order to ensure that you gain the necessary mojo to rank for your keywords.

An off site blog is different. With an off site blog, you’ll still gain search engine saturation, but it will be for the blog itself, not your website. You can, however, build links to your website from your blog and that helps with link building.

Keep in mind, though, that most people in your industry will more than likely link to your blog posts before they’ll link to your company website. If your blog is on your company website, you may or may not get that link love. If your blog is on a separate URL then you’ll likely get link love - if your blog posts are well written and draw attention from other bloggers. That will tend to push your blog higher up in the PageRank scale. If you are linking profusely from your blog to your website then that PR will transfer to your website with each link.

That’s it in a nutshell. Blogging is good for Search Engine Optimization when done correctly. Most bloggers, however, are missing the beat here. To be the most effective blogger, you should learn the principles of Search Engine Optimization.

source : http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com