Blogging as a SEO Busting Technique
In our recent post on the subject of “Picking a Domain Name” we discussed using Google’s Free Keyword tool as a place to begin SEO research. Let’s say you’ve been looking around and have discovered a keyphrase opportunity.
If the top contenders competing with you for that domain are static web pages then you should consider using a blog as a means of creating a competitive, SEO advantage.
A lot of people have talked about the SEO value that blogs bring in terms of fresh content. But as Darren Rowse of Problogger points out in his post, “How Much Does Fresh Content Matter in SEO”, fresh content is not the end-all and be-all of SEO.
As Darren points out, there are cases where static sites outrank blogs which are both optimized for the same keyphrase. Even if fresh content is not the end-all of SEO techniques, it’s important to remember is that fresh content does seem to have significant value in the eyes of the search engines.
There is an additional value that blogs bring in terms of SEO benefit that is not often talked about and that is that blogs can easily leverage the internal link structure of a large website. There seems to be a recent trend in the way search engines compute rankings which has increased the significance of on-page factors.
So if you have excellent on-page optimization you can gain leverage in your ability to rank well with the search engines, and as your site grows in size that leverage is increased. Think of this in terms of the “vote theory” of SEO. The idea that each link to a particular page on your site counts as a vote for that page in the eyes of the search engines.
The way we have explained the “vote theory” here is a oversimplification (certain links may potentially hurt rankings), but it helps demonstrate how powerful larger sites can be in terms of SEO clout. For some examples consider checking out sites like Wikipedia, About, and Mahalo.
For practical tips on how to implement a strong internal link structure for your site, check out the post “The Most Overlooked Link Building Strategy…“ From Buzz Blogger.
Since Blogs are designed to make adding content easy they have an advantage in the sense that they can grow quite large (in terms of number of pages) rather quickly.
I would argue that the greatest value of a blog, in terms of its natural SEO strength comes from a combination of factors which include fresh content, the unique SEO footprint which blogs leave, as well as their ability to leverage the internal link structure of a large website.
For more info on this concept check out recent post on Blog SEO tips.
So if you find a keyphrase that’s getting a lot of traffic but doesn’t have that many competing sites indexed, and if your top competitors are using static sites, then you can consider using a blog as an SEO busing technique.
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