So you purchased the perfect domain name, hired the designer, spent time going over mockups and working with your provider to get the look of your new site just right. You’ve finalized the design, and now the e-dust has settled just a bit with website completion, upload, launch, and grand opening announcements. You’ve paid your web designer and have your product and contact information published on a beautiful site on the web. Your meta tags are all in place and your pages are full of content-relevant keywords. You’ve submitted your site to be indexed by the search engines, but you’re sipping morning coffee and itching to do something more to promote your site. So now what?

Blogs are a terrific way to super-charge your website’s SEO rankings. Search engine spiders eat blogs alive (eww) because they’re constantly refreshed with new content. Spiders will visit your site more often when they detect content is changing more frequently. Content-relevant keywords will also help improve SEO. If you sell imported Italian silk ties, your blog entries about poodle grooming will probably not help your conversion rate! Blogs that contain keywords relevant to the main site’s content, with high keyword density, have a better chance of ranking higher on search engines.

Blogs are like Veggies…well, kinda.

Let’s face it – It’s not always easy to write fresh content daily, or several times a week. The web is full of articles – would it hurt to ‘borrow’ one every once in a while, you ask, through fluttering eyelashes? YES! Duplicate content can hurt your SEO ranking on search engines. Fresh, original, content relevant content is best. If you don’t have time, or just aren’t a natural writer, consider hiring a freelancer to write articles for you. Expect to pay about $20-$30 per article, for quality writing. You can pay less, but expect to receive articles that are either copied and modified (if you’re lucky), or written by someone who doesn’t have a very good command of the English language.

The title of your blog is important! Think of it as a headline that will pull your readers in, but also make sure that your blog titles are getting archived. We use WordPress for our blog, and have it set up to poll both category name as well as blog entry title for the link, because when it’s indexed by a search engine, our keywords are more relevant than post1, post2 or other meaningless auto-generated links the blog gives entries.

Please allow a self-serving plug here when I say if you’re unsure how to set up a blog, hire someone (okay, us) to do it for you. If you need some help with content, hire a quality writer to write some entries for you. There are so many benefits to blogging, that the cost to set one up will be worth it’s weight in gold ten times over if done properly.