But, there is an additional benefit that shouldn't be over-looked: there impact on your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Blogging can greatly enhance any websites natural search results through regular postings, and natural keyword placement. There in fact is no stronger way to market ones website for free than by blogging with natural keywords.
Similar to article marketing, posting daily blogs with the keywords of your business included can have remarkable effects on the ranking of your site in any given search engine, and thus net you more traffic. One key to gaining more traffic from keywords is to use ?niche? keywords. These are keywords or keyword phrases that may be searched for less often, but that have less competition. This means you may be able to rank much higher for these keyword. An example: The keyword term ?baseball? is certainly searched for often, but there are millions of websites optimized around this keyword. However a keyword phrase like ?Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz news? would have fewer competitors. The longer keyword also increases the likelihood that your blog contains exactly what the visitor is looking for.
Getting picked up in search engines can lead to increase volumes of traffic heading to your site every day. There are top keyword placers that use blogs to retain huge amounts of daily traffic to their sites just by integrating a variety of niche keywords into their posts. The amazing thing about blogs is they are often picked up by the search engines almost as quickly as one posts to it, which makes it an even more powerful tool for SEO purposes. Our experience has been that blogs that take advantage of Google's Blogger or Wordpress are quickly indexed.
Another way blogging can help your site's search engine ranking is by the quality score. Most search engines, including Google rank sites with a quality score, the more unique, user provided content, the higher it appears the quality score becomes. If a website is just a sales page, and a few pictures, the quality score will most likely be low. But if a site has a blog on it, with fresh, daily posts, the quality score becomes much better, and thus the site gets ranked much higher when people are searching for your niche, or keyword terms.
If you haven't considered a blog for the pure marketing aspect of it, it's probably time you considered it from the SEO perspective. You've got nothing to loss but website visitors.
