SEO Power: 4 Reasons Why Google Loves Blogs

Having a business blog is possibly the single most important thing you can do to boost your company’s organic Search Engine Optimization efforts. When you combine business blogging with Search Engine Optimization, you are really talking about a branch of Content Marketing.

Tom’s definition of Content Marketing:

“Original copy, images and/or video produced by a company or person that is freely available to the public. This content adds value to its readers and simultaneously reinforces the creator’s brand, drives conversion and boosts strategic SEO.”

Why is Content Marketing so important?  Three words: Google Loves It.

Google loves fresh content

How often do you update your website? Once a quarter? Less?  Many companies update their website less than 3 times a year. Unless you are a University or Large B2C company, you probably don’t update your website very often. Your website is a beautiful digital representation of your brand. You spend a lot of time, effort and money on design, image selection, navigation and copy. It’s a ton of work! Once you get it set, most people like to leave it alone for a while. It’s like a very nice store window display. You don’t see Macy’s changing out their elaborate store window displays on a daily basis.

Blogs are less formal. They should have a nice design and functional widgets but the content doesn’t have to be quite as polished. Timely content is more important than shiny content. The more frequently you produce blog content, the more frequently Google (and other search engines) crawl and index your site. This is becoming even more important with a recent update Google made to its Algorithm.

Google loves original content

By now you’ve likely heard of the Panda update, sometimes called the Farmer update. This is Google’s algorithmic change which punishes sites that scrape original content from other sites and rewards sites who produce that original content. In the words of Google: “Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible… people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that [is] just not that useful.” Basically, Google will reward you for producing original and frequent blog content that people want to read. No tricks no gimmicks. Just good old fashioned blogging.

Google wants to know what you care about

Think about this from the Google’s perspective. Google’s job is to deliver the best, most relevant content to the person searching for it. What if you have that most relevant content but you don’t let Google know you have it? They will be unable to deliver your content to the searcher even though they would love to. Google can do almost anything… but they can’t read your mind. As you produce your blogs, know which keywords and phrases you care most about and use them frequently in your writing. You will want to vet these keywords for search frequency and competition. If you don’t know how to do this, find an agency or SEO company to help you. You want to get this right. By putting the right keywords and phrases into your blogs – consistently over time – you will slowly see positive SEO results because Google will know what you care about the most.

Google watches links and People link to blogs

As a general rule, people tend to link to blogs more frequently than websites. The reason is simple. Blog posts are usually more engaging, more helpful, more controversial, more humorous and more interesting than the marketing crap on your website. See! – I would never write “crap” on my website, but here it is in this blog post!

Why are links to your blog important? Google uses inbound links to validate your website, your blog and your overall content. Algorithms cannot read and assess the quality of content, so they rely on humans saying “I find this post interesting… so I’m going to link to it”. The more links, the better! The more powerful the link – even better!! (a link from MySuperCoolSite.com is not nearly as powerful as a link from NBC.com, for example). Bottom line… you want inbound links? Then blog!

About the Author / Guest Blogger:

Tom Williams is the President and Founder of InnoGage. InnoGage is a Digital Marketing agency offering Digital and Social Marketing consulting and Organic and PPC Search Engine Optimization services. Our flagship technology product is InnoBlogs, Business Blogging Software. InnoBlogs makes it easy for a company to run a Collaborative blog that drives content strategy, targeted Search Engine Optimization and measurable customer conversion.