Developing your on site blog can have a big search engine optimisation impact

Top Position’s search engine optimisation (SEO) experts regularly advise their clients on the benefits of social media. Blogs often top the list of social media streams that they’re most keen to get on board with thanks to their internet-wide popularity and many SEO benefits.

Blogging can be done both on and off site but in this article we’re going to look at how onsite blogs can contribute to better  web site rankings and how they can be fully utilised by even the novice site owner.

The main attraction of integrating a blog with your web site is that it offers a convenient location to place new content. By its very nature, a blog also ensures that regular content is added to the site, keeping the look fresh and giving regular visitors topical information to browse through. Content is the crux of on page optimisation so fresh blog content is a big step towards improved rankings.

A blog that is updated and on topic also forms a great news and article archive. This is an invaluable resource if the posters offer engaging and insightful news and views. Such information is useful linkbait and will provide third party sites with a reason to link back to the blog. These inbound links will make off page optimisation easier. As with all good quality links, blog referrals will increase the site’s overall online visibility while helping the web site to achieve better rankings.

If you allow readers to comment on blog postings, your site visitors can actually help you reach your optimisation goals. With one or two topical posts per month encouraging a discussion amongst visitors, the comments being left will increase the content to code ratio of the page, doing much of the optimisation work for you. Comments left by visitors will typically be keyword rich as they will be discussing and contributing to the topic the main blog post started. Their own content is then likely to follow this same pattern with synonyms of keywords and keywords themselves featuring heavily.