Effectively Using Blogs For Your Search Engine Optimisation Efforts

Everyone talks about blog these days and Google loves them. So why have you not yet got one? A blog is a really easy way to add quality content to your site and show Google that you are updating your site regularly. We all know that this is what Google wants to see, especially if you are working on a long term SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) plan.

Many people seem to think that blogs are for people to spout off about their own opinions and offer the reader no 'real' advice. If this was the case then why are so many business owners spending the time and effort to develop a blog on their websites and some are even scrapping the websites to make way for the blog?

Blogs have been developed to be exactly what the search engines want to see, especially Google. In fact Google loves them so much that they will index a blog quicker than most websites. People have found that they can get a blog indexed by Google within hours!

Just creating a blog and posting to it a few times a week won't be nearly enough to get you picked up by the search engines. Thousands of people have already done this and now people who visit the blogs see them all as the same blog.

There are some useful techniques that you can use that will get your blog standing out from the crowd and picked up by the search engines in quick time. The first rule is that you need to make time each day for your blogging efforts. The suggested time for doing something to your blog everyday is about a month. After the initial month you can then lessen your efforts – but never forget about it!

When you create your blog you need to make sure that you don't use the default template just like everyone else has done. You will just blend into the crowd of blogs that are already out there. If you have a website that you developed yourself changing the blog will be easy. If not you can hire a company to do this or learn how to do it yourself.

Once your blog is there you need to start posting and you need to consider the importance of keywords or keyword phrases. You need to make sure that the content you place on it is optimised to the keywords that you want to be found under.

Each time you post to your blog you should ping your blog. You can do a simple search to find out about pinging. Pinging takes advantage of the social bookmarking sites out there too. It also serves at giving you quality backlinks to your blog.

Don't fall into the trap of sending your site to thousands of directories. The quality over quantity rule comes into play here. You can send your site to hundreds of sites that have no PR at all. This may help you a little, but just two backlinks from sites with a PR of 3 or 4 will give you credibility with Google. Backlinks from high ranking PR sites will let you piggyback off their efforts. Google already loves their site and has rewarded it with a PR. If they are linking to your site then you must also be doing something right!

Another great tip when you start your blog is to not go mad submitting the blog everywhere in day one. Getting some quality content on your site first can give you even better results. If you have a blog with 50-100 posts on full of quality content then other sites will see that you are offering quality content and link to you themselves.

This is what Google loves to see, natural organic results that you have not manufactured in an effort to get listed quickly. If you do everything in the first day, you may well get pulled into the 'honeymoon' period with Google where they rank you high and then after a week or so you drop off the radar.

If this does happen to you, just repeat the processes already discussed over a longer period of time and you will soon be back where you belong.

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