Clients of mine often ask me what’s the big deal with blogs. I normally trot out the standard pitch about blogs being both search engine friendly and reader friendly. In other words, using a blog effectively gives you a good way to enhance your search engine exposure and rankings at the same time as giving your visitors current information and a more personal connection to your activities, projects, ideas, opinions, etc.

I’m talking about business blogs here - blogs used to enhance your corporate image, improve communication between you and your clients, expand on product features and benefits, or collect input and opinions from visitors.

You can’t do any of these things effectively with a normal - even a nicely designed static website. But with a blog it is fairly easy. The key, of course, is to create quality content that your readers are interested in reading. And then invite their feedback.

The SEO advantages of doing this are a slightly different matter, a bit more obscure and harder for many people to grasp. When all is said and done, SEO is all about keywords. Search Engine Optimization amounts to the systematic and disciplined use of specific keywords in the most advantageous places within your web content.

In other words, the point of SEO is to give the search engines a clear idea of what each web page, article, video, press release, etc. is about. This will help you move up in the high stakes game of search engine results, make you visible to the right people, and drive traffic to your site.

Creating a blog increases your odds in the search engine traffic game. There are a number of reasons…

1. Because your blog is being updated on a regular basis the search engines will visit more often, and if your content is deemed worthy of attention, your posts will start appearing in search engine results very quickly.

2. If you are using your blog effectively you will be creating posts once a day, or every few days, and you will be be discussing a series of issues or providing information about a fairly narrow subject area -in my case, for example, about “local business marketing”. The cumulative effect of regularly creating content focusing on a narrow, well-defined area is to gradually establish your blog as a worthwhile source of information on your chosen topic - what Google calls an “authority”. The more authoritative your site or blog becomes, the better it will do in search engine results.

3. The fact that you are creating new pages (for the search engines each post is considered a “page”) means that you can cover a wider range of keywords. If you watch the sources of your search traffic you will notice that people find you by searching for a very large number of keyword phrases, variations and combinations. Creating posts on a regular basis lets you “optimize” each of them for different keywords. Hopefully they will all be related to your primary area, but they will also let you expand your focus somewhat.

For example, a website about SEO may contain several pages discussing the merits of search engine optimization, and the specific methods you employ to enhance a client’s search engine rankings. SEO theory suggests each of those pages should focus on a fairly narrow set of keywords.

But if you have a blog about SEO you can create a virtually unlimited range of pages about different aspects of SEO:

Onpage SEO
SEO and traffic
Offpage SEO
SEO and links
SEO and Wordpress
SEO and Blogs
Article marketing SEO
SEO and video

And unlike with normal website pages you can be very specific in your focus:

The best SEO Wordpress plugins
Can Search Engine Optimization Turn Your Business Around
SEO and Corporate Blogging
etc., etc.

All of this amounts to saying that dollar for dollar, a blog has much more SEO potential than a standard website. That does not mean you should abandon your standard, relatively static website, because there are some things that blogs (so far) don’t do very well. But it certainly suggests a blog can be a powerful weapon in your overall strategy to win in the online marketing game.