SEM

First of all, blogging is a fantastic marketing tool. It offers a portal for professionals to share their expertise, thus helping to establish their credibility. If you blog on a regular basis, and have something of interest to them, people will find you. If you continue to offer information that is useful to them, they will return. And if you continue still, they will likely bookmark your site, or subscribe to your site so they don’t miss anything you have to say. You may have gathered that consistency is the key, here.

Yes, you have probably heard that most blogs are political rants or seedy journals; but you have probably also heard NPR or other news sources citing “award-winning blogs†lately in their commentary. That is because, like all media, one must know how to sort through the junk to get to the treasure. And if you are offering treasure, you will reap the rewards.

But I am not interested in discussing the benefits of blogging, Web 2.0, or social media, there are plenty of credible people out there discussing those topics. The purpose of this site is to make use of the tremendous advantage blogging platforms offer to search engine placement and overall Web exposure; not to mention the ease at which they can be implemented, and the power they put in the hands of laymen.

Let me explain, hopefully in laymen’s terms, one way most search engines, Google in particular, determine how well your site will place when someone enters search terms into their engines.

Simply put, Google’s algorithms, or “spiders†as they are called, regularly “crawl†the contents of your site and “index†it based on the most relevant words or phrases used throughout your site (these are usually referred to as “keywordsâ€). Other algorithms then use that index to determine how relevant your content is to the search terms that are entered by people searching for Websites like yours. Therefore, the more relevant the content is on your site to what you are offering, the better your Website will place when someone is actually looking for your offering.

Not only is the content important, but the rate at which it changes is as well. If the content on your site has not changed since the last time a spider crawled your site, it will not bother to re-index it, and that will also affect your placement. So what is on your site, and how often you change it are key elements to getting good placement.

By now I hope you see where I am going with this. Using a blogging platform such as WordPress - by its very nature - is a brilliant way to improve your search engine placement. Each time you post a blog entry to your site, you are reinforcing your site’s relevance, and keeping your site dynamic - two things, as I mentioned, that greatly improve your placement.

It is important to note, however, that your blog entries need to be relevant to what your site is representing. If you want people to find your site because you have a book to sell to them, or because you want to offer them counseling services, don’t blog about how cute your pit bull looked in the tutu you dressed him in last week. Remember that relevance is one of the keys to good search engine placement.

This is only one of many variables that will improve your search engine placement. I will talk about additional ways in which WordPress can lend to better placement in subsequent posts. If you would like to know more right away, visit Aaron Wall’s SEO Book blog.