How Blogging Can Help You with SEO - A Beginner's Guide

Blogging is fun and easy to do, and you may be interested in learning how blogging can help you with SEO. You don't have to be a programming genius to set up and maintain a blog. You don't even need to know HTML. If you are new to blogs, websites, and online business in general, start by taking the easy road to learning how blogging can help you with SEO.

First, sign up with a free blogging service, such as Blogger at http://www.blogger.com or Blogit at http://www.blogit.com . Setting up an account is very easy, and takes about five minutes. This is the easiest way to get started blogging, and you can increase your website popularity in the search engines a bit while doing it. Simply use your website URL in each of your blog posts. In other words, every time you write your blog, make sure that you refer to your website. This provides you with inbound links.

Once you get the hang of blogging, your next step in learning how blogging can help you with SEO is to set up a blog on your website. Many webhosting accounts now include blogs. If you can't figure out how to set one up on your website, contact your webhosting company. They will either do it for you, or tell you how to do it. Some webhosting companies charge for the setup, some do not.

Once your blog is set up on your website, continue doing what you've already learned how to do, but add another step. Each time you post, you can still refer to specific pages on your website, but also use your keywords throughout each of the posts. For a post that is three or four hundred words long, use your keywords and key word phrases five or six times. This will optimize those posts for the search engines.

As you continue to blog, you will continually be adding new content to your website. As you add new content, your ranking will go up in the search engines. Each time you finish posting to your blog, you need to let the rest of the world know that you've done so by pinging it. This is done through Ping-O-Matic at http://www.pingomatic.com. This will send a ping to several blog directories.

You should put a link to your blog on your website - whether it is hosted remotely or through your webhosting account. This will help increase traffic to your blog, and help you develop a readership. As people become more and more interested in your blog, two things will happen. First, your search engine ranking will go up simply based on the amount of traffic your blog is getting.

Second, other bloggers will start sending Trackbacks to your blog on their blogs so that their readers can see what you have to say on certain topics. This helps build your readership as well. It is a never ending circle that just keeps getting bigger if you know what you are doing!

You should also send Trackbacks to other people's blogs as well. When they see the Trackback, they will usually visit your blog to see what you had to say about theirs. Again, this increases your traffic, and potentially increases your readership as well.

Make it a habit to post to your blog regularly. You can post daily, weekly, or even monthly - but posting daily or weekly will get you the best results if you are trying to learn how blogging can help you with SEO. Blog posts can be long or short. If you have a lot of time to write, make them long. If you only have a few minutes to spare each day, write one or two paragraphs - just be sure to use your keywords and key phrases!