Why One Blog Is Not Enough

There is more than one reason to produce blog content. Not everyone needs a blog for customer service or to prove how smart they are in their business. Those blogs are good for marketing and there’s nothing wrong with having them if you see a need for them in your business. But why not use a blog for SEO?

Understanding how search engines work is key to good search engine marketing, and especially blog marketing. One of the criteria that search engines use to rank web pages is link popularity. Understand, of course, that link popularity alone won’t get you high rankings, but it does help. And if you’re not sure what link popularity is, try this definition:

Link popularity is the raw number of inbound links to a single web property as reported by the search engines.

Note that your actual link popularity may be higher than reported. That’s because Google doesn’t report every single link. MSN currently does not report any links. Yahoo!, however, tends to count every link, including those from the same domain and links with the nofollow attribute.

When you build a blog, you’ll want to use anchor text to link to important pages on your website within the sidebar. Those sidebar links will be counted and credited toward link popularity by the search engines every time you publish a new blog post. Google will likely only report those links once, but they could be counting them more than that. Yahoo!, on the other hand, will report every link for each blog post that is indexed at the search engine. Over time, those links add up and your link popularity increases.

Now, imagine having multiple blogs. If you build inbound links through your blog sidebar with every blog post and you have five blogs then you build five times the links. Those links are used by the search engines to determine your ranking for your important keywords.

Niche blog marketing is an idea whose time has come. If you are a company with more than one division then you can benefit from having more than one blog. If you do business in several states or geographic regions then you can have a blog for each region and geotarget each one for maximum link building purposes. These inbound links to your primary website can push you higher up in the rankings and I’ve seen websites move into the top 5 of Google within months or weeks.