LifestyleDesignUnleashed

photo credit: tropical.pete

It has been suggested in the past by a number of jokers that “blog” stands for “better listings on Google” because it seems that blogs get all the best rankings in the search engines. Ask most people about blogging and they’ll tell you it’s great for search engine rankings and everyone should start a blog.

Except that I’m not convinced by this argument. I think it’s one of those “golden rules” that everyone just accepts without actually questioning it’s validity.

Today I want to explain why in my opinion and experience blogs *aren’t* necessarily the holy grail for top search engine rankings and equally what you can do to greatly increase your chances of success when running a blog.

When it comes to a decent search engine ranking there are two main factors we need to concern ourselves with; onpage optimization and link building. Quite simply if we want our website to rank well for the phrase “lifestyle design” (as I do for this blog) we want to mention the phrase lifestyle design several times on our site and then build a number of links to our site which say the same thing.

The more links we have and the higher the quality of sites that are linking to us, the better our ranking will be.

However there is also a “trickle down” effect of these links. If we have hundreds of links pointing to our homepage then the other pages on our site that we link to from this page will also receive some of this link juice, thus helping those individual pages of our site also rank better.

And lots of additional pages that rank well for high traffic keyword phrases means plenty more visitors for us – and most likely profit as a result.

A standard website consists of a set number of pages, each of which is typically linked to from the navigation menu, thus each page of the site receives a reasonable amount of link juice from the homepage and are all likely to rank quite well.

In this way I have had some crazy experiences like one site I built having it’s “contact us” page outranking millions of other sites in a very competitive niche for a very profitable keyword phrase just because I put that keyword phrase on the page a few times and the page then received considerable link juice from my homepage.

Now contrast this with a blog. By it’s definition a blog is a regularly updated website. New content is added every so often thus encouraging visitors to come back again and read the latest articles.

But over the course of a few months or years this same blog will soon balloon with hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of content. And you certainly can’t link to every single one from your homepage. Indeed typically the homepage will list the latest articles added and perhaps the most popular articles on the site. Older articles have very few (if any) internal links pointing to them. So they often don’t rank very well at all.

Typically a new article will rank well initially as it is on the homepage and is linked to from all over the site from the “latest articles” area of the navigation menu. But when it is old enough to drop off that menu, it’s rankings drop too.

Therefore it is possible to update a blog constantly, adding new content, whilst seeing very little increase in search engine traffic.

This is why I believe that just having a blog isn’t enough to get top search engine rankings. Indeed in those cases where most of the top results are blogs I think it has more to do with the simple fact that there are a lot of blogs competing for that keyword phrase and so by default quite a few of them will get top rankings for their primary keyword phrase (though whether they get top rankings for older articles is another matter).

If you want to generate significant traffic from your blog, including getting good rankings for your individual articles as well as your main homepage, then we need to approach the concept of blogging in a rather different way to just regularly adding new content.

Basically we need to add new content and then build links to it. This is a key element that many blogging authorities fail to mention. Because when your individual articles have a number of links pointing to them they should still retain an excellent ranking even when they drop off your blog homepage.

So how do we build links to individual articles on your blog? There are a ton of them so I don’t want to go into detail about them all but just a few ideas include submitting them to the social bookmarking sites (Bookmarking Demon does this for you if you want an automatic solution), writing and submitting articles to the article directories that link back to individual articles rather than your main homepage and also encouraging your readers to link to posts of yours that they find particularly interesting.

You can also use blog commenting and trackback marketing to increase your results yet further.

You can even use internal linking to increase the links pointing to your individual articles such as through the use of a sitemap (which you can build further links to) and through the use of a “related posts” plugin like I use here on Lifestyle Design Unleashed.

There are two take-home points here. Firstly don’t believe everything you read without testing it out for yourself. Secondly a key element if you decide to build a blog is to ensure you build links to your internal pages as well as your main homepage.

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