How Does Blogging Help SEO?

If you manage any kind of website property, you have to understand what techniques will help or hurt you in the search engine rankings.

Does blogging help SEO ranking? How does content affect the way the internet relates to your brand.

Keep reading to find out everything you need to know about the relationship between content writing and your search rankings.

The Rise of the Blogosphere

In 1999, it is estimated there were less than 100 “blogs” available on the internet. Pyra Labs created a platform called “blogger” at that time, and soon it was off to the races. In 2018, there are an estimated 200 million active blogs on the internet!

A “blog” is a website that publishes information about a specific topic. There are blogs on just about every subject that the human mind can conjure, and some blogs seem to be written by visitors from other worlds! If you can imagine it, there is a blog about it.

Blogs range in quality from hobby projects created by people with passing interest to professional grade literature and journalism put out by the very best in those professions. There’s no barrier to entry for creating a blog. Anybody can do it, and everybody does!

Does Blogging Help SEO

Like every question about SEO, the answer is it depends. Blogging is such a diverse activity that you can’t make any blanket statements about its effect on SEO. You can say that blogging done right, Helps SEO!

Blogs are a way that humans beings express their interest in something. Search engines are trying to increase the quality of their search results. They often look to blogs to understand what interests people.

The Rise of the Machine Mind

Keywords padding was one of the first SEO techniques ever created. If you were publishing – say a fruit blog – writing the phrase “banana banana banana” over and over again all over your blog would indicate to the search engines your blog was about fruit. You could rise in the rankings just by putting the names of fruit all over your web pages.

This method stopped working about 15 years ago. The failure of the first SEO technique set off a constant escalation between the content creators who make blogs and the search engine bots that are trying to understand them.

One of the main things that sites like Google and Bing are doing, is that they are creating artificial intelligence algorithms in an attempt to understand the written content. These “bots” scan almost every site on the internet and index them for the search results.

Long ago, they started by simply counting keywords, but now the bots can understand what is written in a blog pretty well! Of course, it doesn’t approach human-level understanding, but the Google bot can figure out the general subject matter of a blog. Is this a blog about fishing, or is it a blog about making a cake?

Once the search bots get a general understanding of what a blog is about, they attempt to understand what other people think about it. This gives them a two-way index to determine search results: what is on a blog, and what do other people think about the content.

This combining of trying to understand a site, and figuring out what others think about it, leads the search engines to identify “authority” sites. An authority is a blog that focuses on a particular subject and is respected by other sites on the internet.

Linking

One of the main ways that search engines can figure out where “authority” lies in a subject, is with inbound and outbound linking. If there is a fruit “authority” site, and blog articles point back to your banana blog, the search engines will rank your banana blog higher than if they didn’t have those links.

It’s not just the number of links, it is the quality of links that are also important. If you have thousands of links from low ranked sites, that won’t do anything. But a few good links from high-quality authority blogs can really make a difference in your SEO ranking.

A link back to your site is only as good as the quality of the site that it’s coming from. If a site is ranked as an authority by the search engine, then a link will have a real positive impact on your site’s ranking.

Quality Content is King

Ever since the internet was invented, SEO professionals have tried every technique in the book to improve their site’s ranking in the SERPs. Every method eventually comes back to the very first method: Create quality content and you will win. Nothing has ever changed this, and it remains the best advice.

This is where blogging can really come on handy in terms of SEO ranking. It’s pretty easy to write a good blog post. The main ingredients are of genuine interest in the subject and genuine hard work and research.

If a person is truly interested in a subject, they are a very good resource for search engines to understand what’s happening in that field. Bloggers usually have their finger on the pulse of the subject they are blogging about. So search engines will look to popular blogs to understand the subject.

This is how blogging can help your ranking. You can point the search engines so that if you want to understand the subject… visit your site! Be the center of the issue.

You should have high-quality blog posts on your site, and you should arrange guest posts on other high-quality sights that link back to yours. By doing this, you’ll give a real signal to the search engines as to what is important and how that relates to your content.

Blogging Is Good

Does blogging help SEO? The answer is a definite YES! Search engines look to blogs to define the landscape of the subjects that interest bloggers, and you can exploit this behavior to help your ranking.