Posts Tagged 'blogs'

O.k so the title is a little misleading. This isn’t a blog post about the new Ozzie Osbourne, no popstar has eaten any furry animals of any description and I promise no animals were harmed in the making of this blog post.

The reason for the ambiguous title is to demonstrate the power of blogs when it comes to search engine rankings.

After my latest blog post “Let’s talk about Fridges”, (didn’t see it? It’s a must read). I noticed that Google had indexed the post in less than an hour and it was proudly sitting at position number 1 in the Google rankings. I hasten to add that I wasn’t vainly searching for my own blog post, a colleague had pointed this out to me, honest!

My point, blogs work, I don’t mean I’ve finally found a whole new audience to talk about fridges too, but that google and other search engines, like blogs. Which means they should be an integral part of any SEO strategy.

I’m reliably informed by Pancentrics very own SEO guru that my blog post success is only the start, it’s actually possible to set a blog to “ping” Google every time I make a post. Google then crawls the site and my new post can be on the first page of Google for relevant searches within minutes.

Paul, our SEO guru says,

“No other form of SEO activity can deliver results this fast.

Google treats blog posts like this as they are current up to the minute pieces of content and deserve to be at the top of search results at that time.

The flip side is that, without additional SEO activity to support them, blog posts can drop down the rankings for exactly the same reasons. However, this is just one more reason to keep your blog up to date; keep blogging about your subject area and you’ll be able to appear at the top of the search results permanently.”

Thanks for that Paul.

Now for the Acid test, type ‘A popstar ate my gerbil’ into google. Look who’s top.

(This phrase will only be top for about the next 72 hours, performance after this cannot be guaranteed, your home may be at risk if you don’t keep up repayments)

It’s official. The best way to generate traffic to your site is to start blogging. Matt Cutts says so. As head of Google’s Web Spam team, if anyone knows about driving traffic then he should.

As mentioned in his keynote speech at PubCon Search marketing conference in Las Vegas, it’s something I’ve half suspected for some time myself after looking at stats for a given site’s visits compared to blog traffic for the same site.

Just look at the way blogs work. Regularly updated content. Well structured content which is search engine friendly (depending on platform choice). The ability to aggregate content with RSS keeps users engaged, thus promoting return visits. Having good content will encourage in-bound links. The potential for community building around commenters has the potential to increase the keywords added to a post which may help drive the post up the rankings.

As a very low effort but high impact way of getting a message out there and dipping your toe in ‘community’ it is unbeatable.

(via FutureLab)