Pages By Nancy

that is the question that I probably get asked most often.  Why should I have a blog?  What good will it do for my online business?

The answer is, having a blog does very little for you if you don’t utilize it to its full extent.  First off a blog is the shortened name for a “Web Log”.  It can be used as an online diary, a place to inform your customers of sales, or new products or it can just be a way for you to satisfy your urge to spread knowledge, wisdom or humor.

The way that blogging helps your rankings is if you use it.  This means going to other blogs, commenting and leaving your blog’s (or websites) address in your signature (there’s a place for that on all comment submission forms on blogs).  The search engine that is most difficult to get and maintain good rankings with is also the most popular.  I’m sure you’ve heard of Google but what you may not know is how Google determines your rankings.  Google algorithms evaluates your popularity.  It’s a popularity contest so the more sites that link to your blog (or website), the more popular you must be.  By leaving your address in comment forms on other sites is a link back to your site and so that helps!

Blogging has a very loose etiquette of “you comment on mine and I’ll come and comment on yours”.  Better yet, is gaining the friendship and familiarity of other blogs and them posting your “button ad” on their site.  This creates a permanent link back to your site from theirs…. that’s another show of popularity!

Google also will look at the top 100 words on your website and those are the keywords that they’ll determine that you belong in.  So it’s important to say what your business is about as high up on the page as possible.

The same can be said for Yahoo and MSN but they use some other ways that also contribute to your search rank.  They’ll look at what’s called “Meta Tags” and “Meta Description”.  Make sure those are in the header of your website, ask your web designer to insert them or if you made the site yourself, make sure you add your keywords in there, seperated by commas.

So back to blogging.  Blogging can and will help your search engine rankings but you have to use it.  Create content that makes people want to come back for more, find a target audience and participate on their blogs and hope they return the favor.  Using blogging as a marketing tool does require a lot of work and you can’t let up on it, but the results can be amazing and rewarding.