For a while now I’ve been telling clients that search engines love blogs.  In fact, when doing research for this post most of the results from Google were blog postings.  Here’s five reasons I believe blogs provide great SEO:

1. Fresh content - If a search engine has the option of showing content created in 2002 about a topic, or a post made a few days ago, it will likely choose the new post.
2. Linking - Search Engine algorithms look at outgoing and incoming links to a site.  Since most business related sites choose not to link to other sites (the “lets keep them on our site as long as possible” mentality), they rank rather low in outgoing links.  And since they aren’t linking to others, others are less likely to link to them.
3. Keyword Rich - Blog posts are short.  Because of that, bloggers get to the point and tend to use more keywords then a jargon filled page written by a marketer and passed through multiple revision processes.  Also, blog posts are categorized and tagged adding more keywords to the content.
4. Good content - When a blogger is blogging multiple times a week, they can only say so much about the same topics before it becomes repetitive and boring: so they stretch.  They blog about how their topics are applied to other industries.  They blog about related news and information.  They blog about anything that fits into their area of expertise.  This creates new unique content that is valuable.  When someone searches for these obscure - or niche - topics, these posts float to the top.
5. RSS - Blogs have RSS feeds.  Search engines are paying more attention to RSS feeds as they provide a clear and concise version of the content without any old school SEO tricks.  An RSS feed contains the post’s date, title, full or abbreviated text, tags, enclosures and other relevant information.  They can’t be faked with a ton of keywords in the sites presentation or meta data.

There are other factors that go into search algorithms besides these and these factors alone will not a first result make.  Please feel free to add any of your own thoughts in the comments below or by emailing me at jkenzer@twelvehorses.com.

tags: SEO, Blogs, Google, Yahoo, Search Engines, RSS

This entry was posted by Josh Kenzer on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Marketing Tools, RSS, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.