Continuing my theme of how as a small business you can improve

your search engine results. In a previous article I extolled

the virtues of article writing and in this one I shall consider

the practicalities and usefulness of adding a weblog to your

site in order to drive more traffic to your web pages.

I am presuming that you have optimised your site, added

numerous pages of content and update or add to that content at

least on a weekly basis. All of this I did with our own website

but still the search engines only visited the site about every 4

– 6 weeks. So although our content was being added to sometimes

on a daily basis I couldn’t induce the Google spider in

particular to visit the site more often even though I was

submitting sitemaps to Google.which informed it of these

updates.

I then started reading about the benefits to businesses of

having a weblog attached to the site. SEO’s were and still do

wax lyrical about how search engines just love weblogs. On this

basis I decided to give it a go and looked around at the various

free blog sites and finally settled on http://www.blogger.com as

this site allowed the blog to be integrated into the website and

offered a multitude of templates to choose from. So I chose my

template and went through the process of integration with the

website which is a very simple and easy process to follow. The

next step was to start writing the blog. Very quickly I

discovered that it was the ideal vehicle for announcing new

services, new products and new branch openings as well as

informing the readers of our day to day activities and

experiences. All of it is excellent content and the SEO’s were

quite correct in that the search engine spiders do love it. So

much so that the googlebot spider visits everyday to update the

web pages and the weblog. This now means that when my content

changes or new pages are added they are immediately indexed by

Google. This has done wonders for the search engine placement

of the site.

The second benefit that SEO’s talked about was the increased

number of links that having a blog would bring in. This part I

didn’t quite believe as I couldn’t see how it would do this. I

am still not certain of how and why it does attract links but

the truth of the matter is that it does. The articles and the

weblog seem to inhabit a world of their own and they certainly

take on a life which you have no control over. However the

combined effect is to boost your own content, attract search

engines to visit your site frequently, increase the number of

backlinks to your site and increase the number of visitors. All

of which are of tremendous benefit to you as a business.

The latest figures I saw published for the number of businesses

with weblogs was only 2%. So all you small businesses out there

with a website, get writing articles and add a weblog to your

site. Keep that updated, preferably on a daily basis, and you

will soon see dramatic effects both on your visitor numbers and

your search engine placement.