The standing of the blog within Web 2.0 circles has diminished recently. Many social media experts and internet marketing professionals have even started to dismiss the blog as an industry relic. It’s an interesting position, and one that does have some theoretical grounding to it.

But for a number of reasons, the blog is still a very important part of a successful online marketing strategy. Not necessarily the traditionally-defined blog, but the ‘blog’ that has emerged from within the context of Web 2.0 as it exists today.

How exactly do blogs contribute to an effective web marketing portfolio?

1. Blogs are the internet equivalent of expert credentials. Maintaining a blog sends a message to readers that the author holds a wealth of knowledge over the subject matter and provides the company with credibility and authority. By maintaining a blog, your company can prove that it’s an expert in its field.

2. The old adage still holds true today: content is king. Content will grab new readers who are searching for information on a given topic and bring them right into your website. Your content will bring new readers into your sphere of influence and get them to associate your brand with expertise on your subject. A blog allows you to share information and simultaneously distribute your brand. Your blog is your corporate research team – your website is your sales team.

3. Blogs drive traffic through search engine optimization. The internet’s leading search engines love blogs because they often contain useful, informative content – and maintaining a blog on your website lets your brand reap the benefits of that added search exposure. Updating your corporate website daily with new information is impractical, if not impossible. But updating your corporate blog daily is easy, and it’s a great way to hook new readers and increase your search engine market share.

4. A blog is like your company’s vacation home. Increasing the amount of information about your company on the internet only increases the number of ways that potential customers can become familiar with your brand. If you think of potential customers as potential house guests, then owning a vacation home only helps you accommodate even more.

5. A blog lets you not only facilitate discussions about your company’s products and services, but it also lets you lead those discussions. Social networks are great for spreading the word about your company, but once those discussions are being hosted elsewhere, your company has very little control over what they’re based upon. Nurturing a community about your brand through your blog lets you keep the noise to a minimum. Why let a third party site control the information that gets posted about your company?

Sure, blogs are a great way for a company to increase its exposure to new internet traffic and maintain the quality of the information available about it on the internet. But blogs, like anything else, need to be approached in a sensible way.

Here are some tips for maintaining your company’s blog:

1. Keep the marketing to a minimum! A blog isn’t an advertisement – it’s an online discussion. Treat readers like adults and they’ll respect you for it. You can’t use a blog to issue press releases.

2. Keep your blog in a subdomain of your company’s website – like blog.company.com. Don’t use an external site to host your blog, or the great content you’re posting won’t help your company website’s search engine optimization. Remember, you want all of that great insight associated with your company’s website.

3. Keep company-related keywords in mind when writing blog post. Your content should be comprised of rich keywords by about 3 to 5%. Come up with a list of keywords that you’d like your company to be associated with and use them effectively in your blog posts. This will help search engines associate your site with the phrases that drive your business.

4. Personalize your blog! If a potential customer reaches your blog and thinks it was written by a corporate drone in a business suit, she’s not likely to stay for long. Put pictures of real employees next to their names when they write posts, and let them communicate a unique, honest "voice." Customers trust people, not corporations.

5. Promote your blog! A great way to get the word out about your company’s blog is to announce it using social networks. Let viral marketing do the heavy lifting so you can focus on the content. A blog is useless if no one is reading it.

6. Let readers respond to your words. A great way to facilitate this is through comments on blog posts. This not only produces even more content to be picked up by search engines, but it sends the signal that your blog is a place for honest, sincere discussion to take place. You want to create a community around your blog that brings people back.