Frequent readers of this blog are aware that we’re committed proponents of business blogging; here are just a couple of posts that have discussed its many benefits…
Perhaps we haven’t leaned quite hard enough on the search engine optimization (SEO) – or page rank – benefit, though. Posting in the Social Media Examiner, Jim Lodico essentially says you can probably justify your entire blogging effort on that one effect. Or, as he puts it:
“Incorporating a blog into a website can have a huge impact on the overall website’s search engine rankings.”
Skeptical? Consider Jim’s two primary arguments…
Size matters.
It’s been true for awhile now that – other things more or less equal – larger sites fare better than smaller ones in the search-engine rankings derby. The typical young B2B, with a typical 10-20 page site, is at a substantial disadvantage. Even in the best-case scenario (the site is well-built, keyword-focused, with all the appropriate code and metadata), the engines can at most index those 10-20 pages and tie them to the relevant keywords.
Now let’s introduce a blog, with a fairly aggressive plan: you’ve signed up 5 internal authors who will each do one post a week. May not sound like much, but guess what? …in only one month, their output will double the page count of your site, thereby raising to 30-40 the number of pages that can be indexed by the engines. Play this out over a year, and you’re up to ~250 pages, which exceeds the website size of many a long-established company.
Jim again: “Each indexed page adds another ticket to the great Google lottery. The more tickets you hold, the better (your) chance of winning the top spot in the search engine rankings.”
Links to success.
If there’s anything that Google prizes even more than relevant content, it’s inbound links from authoritative sites. So your blog is now rolling along on plan, and at some point it starts to get noticed by other bloggers in your industry …some of whom link to one of your posts from one of theirs, and/or include your blog in their blogroll.
One day an enterprising New York Times or Wall Street Journal reporter doing a story on your industry comes across one of your blogposts during her research, and includes a link to it in her story. To Google’s engine, a link from an authoritative site like the Times or Journal is pure gold, and that value is conferred upon your website via page rank.
Clearly, this is a process that tends to feed on itself and grow geometrically …over time leaving your blogless competitors in the dust.
Jim’s post is well worth the click over for the real-world SMB example it includes (an independent urban real-estate brokerage… if they can do it, so can your B2B!). As Jim says by way of summary:
“A blog is one of the best ways to continually add (indexed) pages to a website that generate relevant and reputable links.”
