And I gotta Bridge I want to sell you.
So not to try to take anyone's dinner off their table, but lets be real here and have a real conversation. Let's not be parrots and give a xerox copy of every other website advice that claims to do SEO.
Google so called enamoration with blogs makes for a good sales pitch, but it is technically false. If that was true perhaps we would see more blogs in the top of Alexa.
Google does not love blogs, or favor blogs any more than it favors any other website. In fact a blog is a website. Google doesn't love anything. It follows links and indexes the web. The easier you make it for them may help your cause. But it is not a guarantee.
Most blogs do have three advantages pre-built into its design. They are conveniences though as they can be built into any website.....
1. Blog and Ping
How the rumor started. Back about 2003, 2004, you could ping anything. I mean anything on a page with RSS on it and the page would get indexed super quick and it would have a leg up on getting its keyword found in the top of the search results (SERPS). Like all good tricks, the engines found it out and limited its power.
Pinging still helps but it is no longer close to being the secret sauce it once was.
The ping basically tells rss directories to come visit for new content. Then they list the content in the directory. And Google comes to the RSS directory and next thing you know, Google is picking up your pages new content.
This was a black hat/ grey hat favorite and it was abused to death. I know of many folks that would ping several times a day. Sometimes every 15 minutes. This was abusing the hell out of the ping services bandwidth. It would eventually become a red flag. Do this today, and many directories will ban you, let alone the engine.
2. Proper Coding
Most blogs are generally configured in a SEO friendly way. It does not mean however that is a magic pill. SEO friendly is not SEO. As there is a giant list of SEO must dos if a blog is to compete. And in fact, the blogs advantages has in some ways become its disadvantage in the search engine.
As an example, the way that a blog is set up, it can spit out several variations of itself several times in the site. The main page of posts, the archives, and categories can all be seen as duplicate and can cause a webmaster fits.
3. Content
Long ago my mentor who got me started in this business and left, came back and built a mortgage site. He was a lead broker.
I told him to succeed you have to blog and ping these days (2004-2005). Being an independent thinker he reconstructed his website (not blog) to include a daily barrage of mortgage articles. 3 articles a day was his rule. He hand coded them and built rss syndication for each one. I was telling him, "Dude, its much easier to just blog the thing. You are killing yourself for nothing".
That story echoes in my head as I am reminded of his 1/4 million dollar pay day. Yah he sold the site. He saw a blog platform's "ease" of use as a hindrance to his creativity and thus did the same thing and better without the platform. Again, a blog is a website built thru a platform.
So a blog by nature is easy to use and thus by definition causes one to add content or they will not usually start at all.
To me this is the largest advantage of a blog. The blog begs its author to add another post. Thus, it is more likely to be filled with content.
And content always is what can help start the Google Happy Train to come your way.
