Article Discussion: Blogs and Search Engine Optimization

You say you don't read internet weblogs, better known as blogs? You probably say the reason, you don't read blogs, is you don't care about the personal musings and random thoughts, of people you don't even know. Well, blogs have come a long way baby! They are not just about cheese sandwiches and the lovelorn anymore. While the internet equivalent of the home movie still exists, in the form of the online diary or journal, they have been joined by a new phenomenon: the business blog.

Read the full article here: Blogs and Search Engine Optimization

Thanks for the great article! It answered most of the questions I had about
blogging, which was a gray area for me.

Yea - I set up two blogs. One is the blog in my sig and the second I set up a week ago for internal use. I love them.

Very interesting article. While I have noticed a number of businesses starting to employ blogging to perform tasks that were previously confined to release notes, FAQ's, etc, I never really considered the SERP implications.

I am interested in the possibility of employing a BLOG and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions regarding a stand alone product, one that can be integrated into an existing web site?

RustyBrick -- I took a look at your BLOG and liked the features it possessed. Is that a home-grown app or is it publically available?

Many thanks in advance.

Rusty always has the best stuff ;) Cmon Rusty share the wealth!

You can integrate most blogs into your site, I was lazy and did not for my Internal blog.

I use MovableType http://www.movabletype.org/ - its easy to use and set up.

In fact, almost all of the major blogging platforms will integrate a blog into a website. Posts are easily moved around by FTP. Business blogs are a growing segment in the web world.

Because of the ease of regular updates, news and commentary on your business can be made available in minutes. The mainstream media is beginning to take notice of business blogs as well. They are starting to go regularly to blogs for news article leads. In many ways, blogs are making some inroads into the traditional press release.

The optimization benefits of blogs stem from their freshly updated content and bloggers' generous linking practices.

Wayne Hurlbert (article author)

i was lead to believe that 'Google' was now penalising for using blogs to improve page rank. is this true. Also was the Florida update due to the fact that google is going to floated on the stock market and was a good way of getting people to advertise by Adwords?

Nope, you were lead wrong.

Welcome to the forum!

uhmm... I wouldn't exactly expect the "generous linking practices" of bloggers to carry over to commercial blogs. If commercial bloggers want extensive linking, IMO, they're going to have to do it among themselves. Which will be a tough nut to crack -- getting commercial sites to link to their competitors or "near" competitors.

..oh... and don't expect to find any commercial blog categories in DMOZ...