If you have ever believed that blog is all about pouring out all your bad emotions which otherwise would not be heard, you are wrong. The word ‘blog’ is the new mantra for the Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the most talked-about three letters among the web community. The single word ‘blog’ has encircled the whole globe and now the Internet has got a new name ‘blogosphere’.
Why are blogs so important in SEO? Everyone now is aware of the fact that SEO techniques value contents more than anything else. What is the relevance of blogs in such a context? Why cannot we include the contents in the main page itself, rather than providing it an additional space under the pseudo tag ‘blogs’?
Search engine algorithms have specific criteria in ranking a website. There comes the importance of keyword density. If a website has sparingly distributed keywords, it will not be identified for SEO. On the other hand, if it contains more than a specific number of keywords in it, it would be ignored as being spam. Thus it is difficult to maintain a website meeting both the criteria always.
The solution to this problem was to renew the contents of the website on a regular basis, by analyzing the trends of the search engines and the hits on the website. Modifying the content could bring some results, as the search engines started identifying them for varied and rich contents. However, the cumbersome task of getting more and more pages added and replacing the old pages with the new became a head-ache for the web professionals. Another issue associated with this solution was that the content-rich pages failed to appeal the users. The most popular websites, such as the product description sites and the e-commerce sites, failed to attract their viewers because of the elaborate contents in them.
This problem has been identified by the webmasters, and blogs have been chosen as the solution for it. Blogs provide the necessary contents for the search engines, and at the same time, it maintains the attractiveness of the website without crowding it with too much contents. Thus the purpose of SEO as well as the fruitful user hits is met.
Blogs have become an imperative marketing strategy for online communication. Its importance in website functioning cannot be ruled out. Therefore, while creating a blog, the following aspects have to be addressed properly.
• Proper use of keywords
• Use of RSS and feed buttons
• Adding the blog title as the permalink
• Adding the blog to directories
• Link building
• Comments
• Offsite tracking
The blog title should contain the keyword/phrase in it. Also the blog URL should contain the same keyword/phrase. There should be proper links to and from the blog to the website.
There is a lot of difference between an article and blog. An article is a descriptive content on a product, whereas a blog is ideally an analytical content. Therefore, it is better to avoid the practice of adding an article in the blog space. Rather, one should create a blog that is brief, conversational, and interesting. It should contain the opinion from the customers rather than the details of the products or services.
Labels: Blogs, Search Engine Optimization
