Do Websites With Blogs Do Better?

Google “Recover Lost Documents” and what do you see? The No. 1 website is a blog. I think that proves something.

Not that standalone html websites can’t rank No. 1. They can. But the Web in 2007 is a lot different than it was in 1999. Back then Yahoo! looked like this:

and Google was virtually unknown, just a blip on anybody’s radar screen outside of Stanford University. It was much easier to rank a web page back in 1999. There weren’t as many competing for rank at any of the search engines. Since Google was barely getting off the ground, it wasn’t even the top search engine targeted by most Internet marketers. But it quickly came to be.

Since 1999, things have changed dramatically. Google’s algorithms have changed thousands of times. Yahoo! has purchased its own search engine crawler technology (Inktomi). Many of the search engines that were popular then are no longer alive or have migrated into something else, and the Internet itself has lost its innocence (if it every had any).

Allow me to modify that last comment: Porn kings no longer control the pace of SEO, though they remain the innovators in new ways of marketing their products. The Internet, while still a research tool primarily, has grown into a huge business enterprise. Folks are making money online, and lots of it.

Why Blogs Are Marketing At Warp Speed
All a blog is really is a glorified web page. Anyone can build a website now without knowing any html. In 1999 that wasn’t so. If you didn’t know html then, you were SOL. Now, you can throw up a blog and just start writing. In fact, your website could be nothing but a blog.

The reason blogs are special tools is because every blog post you write is treated like a separate web page by the search engines. In 1999, if you wanted a 100 page website you had to build 100 separate pages using html and a text editor. Today, all you have to do is write 100 blog posts. That can be 100 days at 1 post per day, 50 days at 2 posts per day, or 25 days at 4 posts per day. You can work it at your own pace. But at the end of 100 blog posts you’d have as many chances at ranking No. 1 for your search term as a webmaster in 1999 would have after spending hundreds of hours building web pages from scratch.

I’d say that’s an improvement, wouldn’t you? But there’s nothing saying you can’t do both – build a static website and a blog. In fact, that’s what most people who have blogs are doing. Your website might have 25 or 30 static pages on it (or more, if you wish) and your blog will just keep adding content to that every time you blog. So if you really want your website to increase its chances of ranking well in the search engines, add a blog, blog to it every day, and SEO every blog post like your life depends on it. Within one year you’ll have so many pages on your website you can’t keep track of them.