We've been stressing the great potential benefits of blogging to clients for some time now. We've put together a list of some great reasons to have a regularly updated blog on your business site as a part of the business's online marketing strategy.

Search engines love content – blogs are built for content

You've heard the term before – Content is King. Having great search engine rankings requires having great, useful content on your website. Google's job is to present searchers with the most useful, relevant content in response to their search queries and Google is good at its job. At its very core, a blog is a tool that's built to be regularly updated with fresh content and search engines recognize this. Google, using various on-page elements and frequency of posts, can recognise and distinguish a blog from a regular website.

Well maintained blogs are crawled more often

Google often crawls regularly updated blogs more often than other websites. Blog posts on this Online Marketing Blog, for example, are often indexed within two minutes of being published. Here's a screenshot of this post, which appeared in search results only a couple of minutes after being published:

By maintaining a blog on your business website as a part of your online marketing strategy, you can encourage search engines to visit your websites more often.

A blog is a great space for company updates & related articles

No business wants a cluttered website, no matter how much they know search engines would love for them to put more content in the form of articles throughout the site. Sometimes you just want to keep a business website simple - a few pages describing what you do and how you do it. A blog provides a great space to put all of that other information on your site without cluttering up your main website pages. Blogs give you the chance to organise that other related information that may not be fully integrated into your existing website pages into neat categories, tags, and archives. Adding a link from your website navigation to your blog will neatly place that information on your site for visitors to read through at will.

A blog is a great way to engage potential customers

A business blog often tends to be more informal than the rest of the website. This can provide a great opportunity to engage potential customers and the community at large through blog comments and links. Bloggers often link to other bloggers, which is not only great from an SEO perspective, but can also be used to further your brand and interact with other bloggers in the industry. A blog can potentially serve as another channel to gain new leads and customers.

Blogs get links

We already mentioned this above, but blogs are great for link building. Popular, useful blog articles on major blogs can get hundreds of links per day. Smaller business blogs certainly can't expect this kind of exposure on all of their blog posts, but blogging as a platform is perfect for bringing in links. If you write useful (or entertaining, where appropriate) articles as opposed to just promotional material on your business blog, chances are you'll find someone to link to this information. Not only do people link naturally to useful, engaging blog posts, but blog articles can also be submitted to hundreds of social bookmarking websites like Digg, Reddit and others to increase article exposure and help to build a stronger link profile.

Blogs can get you a traffic boost

Search engines like Google value fresh, up-to-date content. They often rank brand new blog posts higher than other articles for relevant keywords because people are searching for not only good content, but fresh and current content. This means that your website has the potential to get a nice traffic boost until the newest content takes its spot at the top of the search results for a search term.

The finer details of blogging

Business owners need to know what they're doing to take full advantage of blogging on their business website. Here at ExploreMyBlog Online Marketing, for example, we advise our clients on what blogging platform they should use, install all the required SEO extensions and plugins, make sure the URL structure and hosting is set up in the most beneficial way from a search engine ranking perspective, and take care of all the other nitty gritty details. We then guide clients through basic blogging strategies directly and via our extensive blogging guide. A good online marketing company should be able to advise businesses on how to blog effectively and ensure benefit to both website visitors and search engine rankings.

The benefits of having a business blog are great. Businesses should review their online marketing strategy and decide if blogging can be a viable option for them.

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