SEO 101 – Use a Blog To Help Your Search Ranking Skyrocket

posted by ADMIN // June 05, 2009 // Market Your Website

Website owners spend a lot of money every day trying to capture the highest possible ranking in the search engines. It makes sense that the higher you are ranked, the more people will see you in the search results and click through to your site. If you could discover the magic formula for raising your site’s ranking, it could dramatically impact your site’s traffic. One easy way to help elevate your search rankings is through the use of blogs. These are easy to set up and can have a dramatic impact on helping to raise your rankings with the search engines.

Setting up a blog is easy and most hosting companies will let you add one to your domain for free. Once you have your blog setup, be sure to update the content regularly with fresh articles and discussions. This will help your site in several ways and help your search ranking improve almost immediately.

The reason for this is that at a very basic level, search engines actually rank blogs a little higher than standard websites. They also love blogs that have constant updates to their content and this alone will raise your rankings.

In addition, by publishing a flood of new content on a regular basis, you will actually have the search engines crawl your site more often as it becomes accustomed to seeing these updates. In essence you are training the search engine to crawl your blog and update your rankings based on this new content. The added bonus to this is the fact that simply triggering this extra crawling is in itself a ranking criteria and this actually raises your ranking even more.

Keywords

Be sure to pay attention to keywords in the articles you publish to your blog. Be very careful not to just string together a flimsy article stuffed with keywords, but have them peppered throughout the article in a natural conversational tone. Some of the newer search algorithms are actually smart enough to detect articles that have been jammed with keywords and are intended only to artificially trick a search engine. If the search engines think you are doing this, they can actually drop your rankings.

Having a keyword in the title of the article will count more, as will having a keyword in the first and last sentence of the article. Try to keep the keyword density around 5% for the total article for both the primary and secondary keywords to avoid any problems with the search engines. A good way to determine these keywords is to take your primary keyword and do a search on it to see what other words are related to it on the search engine you care to impress. Choose one or two of these and make them your secondary keywords for a particular article.

If you have a problem keeping up with the need for fresh content, there are a lot of services on the web that can supply you with content geared toward a particular niche. It is important to make sure you have the exclusive rights to a particular article, if possible, to ensure it’s unique. If the same article appears on a few sites, the search engines will know this and it may impact your search rankings. By having a unique article, you will be sure it only has a positive impact on your search rankings.

Links

Another aspect to consider when using blogs to help promote your site is establishing links from other sites. You can do this in a variety of ways. One way would be to search for other blogs related to the topic you are trying to promote and subscribe to them. When a new article is posted there, read it and comment on it. When you do this, you will be able to leave a link back to your blog and establish a higher link count.

Search engines really care about how many sites link to your site and will raise your rankings based on that number. They also care how high the sites linking to you are ranked, and the higher the sites linking to you, the higher your ranking by association. Try and find the leaders in the segment you are trying to impact and see if you can start establishing links with them. Some blogs will be happy to trade links and this will help both of you.

The last technique to consider is purchasing links. There are sites that will sell you a link from their high ranking site back to your site. This is a quick way to improve your ranking, but can be expensive. Also, the search engines have started tracking this kind of activity and are actually counting it against certain sites if they feel this is being done.

Balance

The thing to remember here is that the search engine ranking system is based on a lot of factors. Some of those factors are related to improving your search ranking “on page” by publishing fresh content to your blog regularly, and having a complete site with great content and repeat visitors. Some of the factors a search engine uses to rank you are “off page” such as other sites linking to your site.

The key is finding a good balance. If all you do is start a blog and buy links, it is pretty obvious to a search engine that you are trying to rig the system. It would be much better to get some “on page” optimization started, and then look to purchase links as it is a more balanced approach. Either way, a blog can be a very effective tool to help your website ranking skyrocket and is something that every site should consider.

Author
Rick Smith

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