Blogs were initially used as a platform to increase credibility and communicate a more personalized voice for a company. While they still have this purpose, blogs are now being used to help with SEO. Search engines like websites with frequently updated content. In many cases, blogs can establish higher search engine rankings faster than a regular website. A blog is easier to publish than a regular website, so you can post content to it more often.

Blogs have evolved into content management systems that can include RSS, trackbacks and comments in order to increase websites’ page rankings within natural search listings. Optimized blog content is a great way to reinforce SEO efforts on your website for a few different reasons such as fresher content, page rankings for long tail phrases and more inbound links.

Blog software makes blogging very easy and more beneficial to your site because it can be used to manage content, archive newsletters, post frequently asked questions and provide frequent product updates. With blog software, a search engine un-friendly site can actually gain great rankings in both regular search engines and blog search engines.

Content is integral to getting traffic to a website, but only if it is optimized. If you can optimize a document and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by a search engine, it’s helping your website. For that reason, blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization. Just writing a blog and posting it on your website may help a little bit, but adding links, RSS feeds, etc. to your blog will actually help SEO.

One of the biggest reasons that blogs help SEO is that they provide websites with fresh content on a regular basis. Search engines and readers alike reward fresh content on websites with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more trustworthy and reliable web site.

Blog software provides structured content for your website. Categorizing your content makes it easier for search engine to understand your content, and you have a much better chance of ranking well on the topics that you are blogging about. Blog software also offers a simple URL structure, which makes it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

Blogs that post product or service related information can include internal links to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for page ranking on long tail phrases (obscure key word terms).

Blogs are great for obtaining inbound links because they are much more likely to link to each other than regular websites are. Blogs are a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs; the more media available on your blog, the more likely it will attract inbound links.

Although blogs do help with search engine visibility, you should never blog just for the search engines. You should start a blog for business and communication reasons, but reap the SEO benefits that the blog provides.