A blog is your quickest path to top search engine rankings
It used to be where you could just build a static html site, stuff keywords throughout the title, description, and keyword tags in the code, and you’d be able to rank for those phrases. However, Google’s algorithm is changing from the days of old. Google.com, accessed by hundreds of millions of people each day, uses over two hundred signals in their web search rankings but the keywords meta tag is no longer one of them. (Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog, September 21, 2009) Google disregards keyword meta tags completely and has now turned to favoring sites that feed a continual flow of freshly updated content.
Blogs inherently create a continual flow of fresh content. Each blog posting is actually a new page that is crawled and indexed in Google search results. So, the cumulative effect of writing a lot of content is that you are continually building an inventory of pages that are accessible in Google for a wide range of keyword phrases. If people are finding your content, bookmarking your site, subscribing to your RSS feed, and coming back for more, then that means people will also be linking to your content. The more traffic, subscribers and links you have, the more PageRank will be attributed to your site. PageRank is the number and quality of links to your site. The more PageRank your site has, the higher it will rank in Google, the more often your site will be crawled, and the deeper those crawls will be – all of which adds more PageRank to your blog.
If you’re thinking about starting a blog, I highly recommend using WordPress, an extremely powerful platform for achieving high levels of exposure and top search rankings in Google’s search results. WordPress is a super clean CMS (content management system) that Google finds easy to crawl and who’s coding is well structured. Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, has even stated that WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the technical SEO elements automatically. To boost your blog’s success, check out the following video of Matt Cutt’s talk on SEO for WordPress at WordCamp San Francisco 2009, he shares a wealth of tips and recommendations:
