If you still think blogs are just online diaries, simply another new communications fad, only used by teenagers with too much time on their hands… think again. Blogs can be a powerful component of your SEO strategy. In case you’ve been in a black hole the past couple years or just too old (its ok) to keep up with the latest and greatest, a blog (aka weblog) is simply a chronological log of content published on a web site.
Blogs in their purest form (before marketers learn to exploit them) are exactly what search engines want: regularly updated content that is keyword rich. The average blogger will update their site at least a few times a week, with the most hardcore bloggers posting multiple times a day! As a result of the frequently updated, fresh content, search engine spiders will “crawl” the site more often. The more content that is indexed by search engines, the more results your site will show up for in various search queries.
Quality blogs will also attract a large number of incoming links to your site and content. Bloggers (right now anyway) tend to be non-commercial communities of individuals with similar interests. By nature, they scour the web for new content to share and link to. Additionally, many free blog service providers (kind of like geocities or hotmail of blogging) allow easy linking to other members within their network/community. If someone likes your blog, they’ll link to it without even asking for a reciprocal link. Step out of the mind of an SEO trying to build back links and step into a non-marketer individual’s. You’d just want to link to cool content, right?
As I discussed last week, inbound links to your website are probably one of the most important components to getting high rankings in the major search engines. Relevant inbound links will not only increase the ranking certain search engines give your site, but also help your site get indexed, since search engine spider’s will jump from link to link to crawl the web. Some SEO’s will even utilize a link from Blogger.com, which Google owns and constantly spiders, to help get indexed in Google faster.
Here are some tips / ideas for affiliate marketers to use this strategy:
- Pick a category or vertical that you would like to promote offers in
- Create a blog(s) relating to that topic. Keep it focused however.
- Begin building content, the fastest way can be to copy exerpts from another source (ie- news, press releases, other free content available. Make sure to cite the source and write some comments on it to ensure you have unique content.)
- Keep your blog(s) regularly updated. At least a few times a week.
- Build back links! Network with other bloggers within the community to build a network of inbound links. Also remember: people will naturally link to you if you have great content.
- Utilize blog pinging services that will submit your content updates to various blog search engines. Users subscribed to your blog or blog’s topic will be exposed to your new content. These are the same people that will link to your blog/content if they like what they see!
- Link to any of your other properties. Your blog’s PageRank and inbound links will help any of your other SEO efforts. Don’t link to too many sites however, as too many outbound links from one page could hurt your PageRank.
- And lastly, don’t forget to monetize your site. But of course, I don’t need to tell you how to do that do I? :)
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