Want to be Google Optimized? Then Start a Blog!

In the three years that I’ve been blogging, there’s one thing that I consistently notice among the blogs that I’ve written and written for–most of the traffic comes from search engines. I’ve heard from bloggers as well that this is the case with their sites, and I came to the conclusion that majority of blog traffic does come from relevant searches.

Then I tried to do some rudimentary comparisons in the search engine rankings for relevant keywords between blogs and static websites, and all else equal, blogs tend to rank higher.

Ask any blog consultancy or professional blogger, and they would likely tell you that blogs are SEO-friendly. More particularly, certain blog softwares (like WordPress) are SEO-friendly. And here’s why.

Fresh content. Search engines love fresh content. Updated content tells Google, et al, that a site is not just some placeholder on the web. Having regularly and frequently (if possible) updated content on a site is just like saying a site is alive and getting the Google bots to more actively crawl your server.

Notification mechanisms. Most blog softwares have “ping” mechanisms. These do pretty much the same thing that a “ping” on a client-server relationship does. A blog notifies a notification service whenever new content is published. The notification service (such as Weblogs.com, Technorati.com, etc.) will then be used by other web applications and services like RSS readers and news aggregators to check for new posts available for blogs their users are monitoring.

Trackback mechanisms. Bloggers are fond of linking to other blogs. In essence, blogs “talk” to each other. And when a blog links to a post on another blog, the second blog will be “tracked back,” and a link to the first blog will automatically appear on the feedback thread of the second blog. This is automatic linkage, and helps add to page rank.

(We shall continue this tomorrow.)