It seems like almost every website right now has a blog. Gone are the days of blogs being for computer obsessed people sharing their lives in excessive detail. Blogs, a combination of the words web and log, now adorn most corporate websites. Some are useful for sharing information on updates to products on their websites, others offer helpful information on areas the company deals with, and others just seem to be full of useless drivel. So why do so many websites have a blog?

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the answer. Blogs help a website’s search engine ranking, meaning the website appears higher in results for a specific search term, resulting in more traffic to that particular website.

Search engines rely on hundreds of factors to determine which website will rank first for a particular search term. Although no one knows exactly how they decide, several known factors play an essential role in that process. Keywords tell a search engine what a particular website is about. Search engines analyze websites for frequently used words, which plays a role in ranking. Although they penalize website which have a word too many times to avoid spamming, having a lot of words related to your topic is important. Blogs contain large amounts of text content, and automated search engine robots can’t analyze photos, so having lots of keyword filled text is essential. Individual posts about specific topics will contain important keywords, as well as related words, to boost a website’s rating by search engines.

The All Important Link

More important that keywords are links. Inbound links from other websites are how search engines find a website in the first place, and also how they judge its popularity. A website with numerous inbound links is likely to be more popular and easier to find, so search engines rank it well.

Blog articles are great items to link to. A website with just a few pages focused on selling a product might not have many inbound links, but one with interesting blog articles will have lots of links pointing to the articles, and links on the blog can direct traffic to the main website.

Involving Social Media

Social media enhances this effect. When people find something they find interesting, they are likely to post links to it. Blog content frequently gets posted and shared on social networking sites, making these a great source of inbound links. People are less likely to want to be promotional of a specific company, and so they don’t normally link to sites with corporate material only.

Getting a Blog

If your website doesn’t have a blog, or if you don’t have a website at all, consider getting one. Softway Solutions is a reliable website design Houston Company, and provides a full range of website solutions, including installing blog software. You’ll see your website become popular as you blog interesting content.