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Q: I've heard that having a blog can help improve your rankings on search engines. How does that work?
Ahh Grasshopper - your quest for knowledge has led you to the mysterious powers of the blog!
It's a proven fact that inbound links to a website will increase that sites rankings on relevant search phrases, so I decided set up a Blogger account, at a separate URL, with links back to my site, to help my SEO efforts. The main goal of the blog was to increase my website's ranking on my tier-one search phrases (web design austin texas, website design austin texas).
Most of my posts feature keywords, and keyword links back to my site. Whether or not people were reading my blog was completely irrelevant to me. What was relevant was whether or not search engines were reading my blog. Other than using good design principles, I was not trying any other SEO methods on my website at the time.
Within a few months my website was ranking highly, with several of my search phrases producing Google page one results. I begin employing other active SEO techniques and over time I've been fortunate enough to have a good number of my relevant search phrases appearing on page one and I attribute a large part of this success to my blog. Since Google owns Blogger I had a suspicion that Google might give preferential treatment to Blogger and crawl it more often than other sites.
Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
The next morning I performed a Google search on the phrase "howard mcnear web design" and my blog article came up as the number one result! The goal of my experiment was not to rank highly for searches on "howard mcnear web design", but to see how fast Google would index the new article. I was absolutely shocked to see this kind of result. My next experiment will be to post a similar article to a blog I have on WordPress and compare the results.
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RUN - Don't Walk!
If you don't already have a Blogger account, my advice is to get one post-haste! It's free and easy to set up your blog and you don't need to know any code. Decide in advance what key search phrases you want to promote, then begin posting. Make sure your posts contain links back to your website. Also, make sure your posts have something to say - don't just create a post full of keywords (another theory I have is that Google will take away points if your articles are not relevant).
Try and post a new article at least every other week - Google likes updated content. Feel free to look at my blog and use any ideas you find helpful there.
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Master Lo's quote of the day:
"Man who eat many prunes get good run for money."
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