Most Web professionals have heard of the potential SEO benefits of including a blog on their websites and updating it regularly. After talking with countless business owners though, it became apparent that many of them do not understand why blogging helps with SEO and with that, why it fails sometimes as well.
Whenever you add a blog post to your website, you are really just creating another page. As with any page on your website, attracting inbound links will improve the authority of that page and, through internal linking, will improve other pages on your website as well. Each new blog post you add gives you another topic/keyword that you could possibly rank for as well as another avenue to feed links into your main website.
If you have been around SEO very long you have likely heard of tiered link building. While stacking one set of spam links on top of another set is what might come to mind, that is not what we are talking about here.
Let's say that you have a page on your ecommerce website for women's fashion accessories. From that page you would likely link out to some of the accessories that you currently have in stock. The internal link from the broad topic page to the more specific pages will give the product pages a boost in authority and possibly in how they rank. You see this in action all the time, just think of sites like Website Magazine (that uses "channel" pages to group like content), Entrepreneur and Huffington Post. They leverage pre-existing internal authority to boost new pages.
You may have noticed that I have not mentioned Page Rank (PR) a single time in this post. This is because PR is a dead metric that is no longer being updated. When trying to understand the power of a website, domain and page authority are the primary metrics you should now be looking at. Installing the free Moz toolbar is a quick and easy way to view the authority of a website and even to look at how internal pages of your site compare when it comes to authority.
Now that you have shifted your thinking and now know how to check the authority of internal pages of your site; how can you increase page authority? This is where blog posts and internal tiered link come in handy. Let's say that you write 20 blog posts over one month and each of those blog posts gets five links. You now have 100 links you can point to an internal page of your site. Going a step further, let's say that the 20 blog posts were about sub-categories of a single topic. You now have 100 external links that can be pointed to a topically themed page via the 20 blog posts.
On the other hand, let's say you write 60 blog posts over a month but do not get any external links pointing to them. Even though the blog posts are linking back to a themed page, their influence will be limited.
Can blogging help with SEO? Yes, but you need to have a plan. Simply writing a blog post and adding it to your site will do very little if you do not have a strategy in place to promote your blogs, earning social shares and inbound links.
Contrary to popular belief, blogging less and spending more time promoting each blog can be more effective than blogging daily (it's an example of SEO mistakes you might be making).
What about you guys? How has blogging helped your business?