Marketers have discovered that blogs are great tools for communicating with your audience. Anyone who has something to sell or an idea to promote can benefit from blogging.

Search marketers especially favor blogs because they have a number of characteristics that make them a favorite with search engines.

1. Fresh, up-to-date and relevant content

When you write a good blog about a topic you’re passionate about and post to it frequently, you’re creating fresh, keyword-rich content that search engines love.

2. Natural one-way links

Search engines see links to your site as a recommendation of your site’s content. More links pointing back to your site or blog increase your visibility and search engine rankings.

Google places more importance on natural one-way inbound links, and blogging makes it easy to get two types of one-way links to your site.

Similar themed blogs

A well-written, authoritative blog with unique content is likely to receive links from other bloggers writing on similar topics. These are natural links that are highly viewed and are given more weight by engines like Google.

RSS feed syndication

Blogs and the RSS feeds embedded in them help you create valuable one-way links to your site by distributing your content online.

3. Get indexed in a matter of hours

When you post to a blog, you “ping” a number of services that list blogs. This notifies the service that your blog has been updated.

Search engines like Google give more weight to blogs that are regularly updated. It is possible to get your pages indexed in Google and other engines within hours of writing your first blog post.

Compared to the time it takes to index a website (days, even weeks), you can see why blogs are better search engine optimization tools than static websites.

Indirect SEO Benefits of Blogging

In addition to the SEO benefits, a well-written, authoritative blog can also build publicity and branding for you, which encourages more people to read and link to your blog.