Blogs

What are the forums feelings on blog directories to increase the size of a website.

Will they help in rankings.

Do you think that they will be seen by Google as deliberate abuse and therefore penalised.

Geoff

One of the top recommendations of anyone trying to promote interest, traffic and links to any website is good content with frequent updates. Blogs are great for that. Don't worry so much about PR. Develop good relevant content that engages people and you will be way ahead of the game. After all... flat content that just sits there is part of the problem.

As for suffering penalities, I'm not sure. But if you are doing a blog, be sure to register it in the blog directores to get links pointing back.

Hopefully someone else here will have more specifics on your query.

Regards,

Agalychnis

Thanks that is very helpful.

Where will I find blog directories, and do you know of any tools that help you write the directories.

Thanks
Geoff

Blogs have the characteristics that are most valued by the various search engines, including Google. In fact, the very nature of blogs is such, that it almost looks like they were created with the search engines in mind.

Blogs are updated frequently with abundant fresh content, laden with keywords. The result is higher search engine rankings for those searches.

Blogs have a natural affinity for adding incoming links, which helps in raising your Google PageRank (Google's measure of the importance of an internet website), and your placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Those two features alone have some fairly insignificant, in some people’s minds, blogs sitting on the first page for many keywords. Those same blogs boast some high PageRanks as well.

Most of the widely available blog templates are easily read and indexed, when crawled by the various search engine spiders. Many of the various blogging templates include pre-written h1 and h2 (and so on) tags, already in place. Titles are readily employed, as are many other recommended SEO practices.

Blogs are certainly easily optimized, even by novice search engine opimization (SEO) practitioners. That includes most bloggers.

From... Blogs And Search Engine Optimization published on SEO Chat.

The article includes a section on blog directories.

Thanks, that is very helpful

Geoff

You're welcome Geoff.

Blogs are still fairly new to many people. Their power for SEO is still largely untapped too.

blogs are beautiful.


.

I see blogs as an easy way to add content to a site....

But why not instead post .html pages with that same content, then you can index them, link them, SEO them, collect adsense on them, etc... however you want.

You're just saying that, Zoo.

The update gave the two blogs in my signature increases in backlinks and helped to solidify their PR6 status.

Your statements, as always Egol, are good ones. of course, most people will have an easier time adding content via a blogging tool. Blogs work well for those who have limited programming skills. Blogs aren't for everyone, but they are potentially very helpful to a strong subset of websites.

Many of the better blogging tools allow for categorizing, indexing, internal linking, and SEO. You can collect Adsense on blogs, and many people are. The main problem many bloggers face is developing traffic, but that is applicable to most websites.

One thing a blog does provide, beyond SEO, is the immediacy of interaction with readers. Through the various blog commenting systems, business bloggers can develop strong customer relationships, with existing and potential customers and clients. Of course, that idea is not what we are discussing here. It's simply another point.

Gotta say blogs are indeed nice. I use a blog for back links to my site. I just blog away. It has a pr of 4 with no incoming links at all. Go figure.

Google PageRanks are indeed strong for blogs. A PR4 or PR5 are so ubiquitous that most bloggers consider them a natural starting point.

When I started Blog Business World, it received a PR5 on its very first update. That was less than a month from launch.

[QUOTE=manitobafarm]Google PageRanks are indeed strong for blogs. A PR4 or PR5 are so ubiquitous that most bloggers consider them a natural starting point.

Ok, how does a blog get a pr of 4 or 5 from the jump without backlinks? I always thought backlinks were mandatory for pr.

1) I hadn't seen this before... 'related searches' on Adwords as seen on: http://www.blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com/
"Related Searches: • blog • grey matter Ads by Google"

2) The main advantage of Blogs & other CMS is the ability for visitors to site search and add comments. Otherwise you might as well just have a standard template & upload hard-coded html.
I don't know if the linking bonus of blogs applies to commercial sites or just my-highschool-agnst-musings blogs.

3) Blog software limitations can handicap your SEO creativity and optimizing, you have to (horrors) rely on content.

4) If you are going to blog make sure you have something to add everyday. Nothing worse (well not much) than a stale blog. Remove dates or use a non-date CMS.

One thing I recommend to my blog readership is to try to post to their business blogs every day. Failing that, at least every other day. In the blogosphere (gotta love that word), time moves quickly. Three days is almost a lifetime in blog days.

Blogs are heavily content dependent, however, that content is constantly fresh: a plus in the eyes of the search engines. Finding daily column topics is an ongoing challenge for virtually every blogger.

Creativity to find new posting ideas is necessary. I'm talking about business related blogs here, by the way. I'm not talking about the teenaged angst, or the "I had a cheese sandwich for lunch" type online diaries. I don't recommend those to businesses at all, except for your own entertainment.

Blogs are a strong promotional and marketing vehicle for a traditional website. If used properly, they can be a very powerful tool.