Continuing my theme of how as a small business you can improve your search engine results. In a previous article I extolled the virtues of article writing and in this one I shall consider the practicalities and usefulness of adding a weblog to your site in order to drive more traffic to your web pages.

I am presuming that you have optimised your site, added numerous pages of content and update or add to that content at least on a weekly basis. All of this I did with our own website but still the search engines only visited the site about every 4 – 6 weeks. So although our content was being added to sometimes on a daily basis I couldn’t induce the Google spider in particular to visit the site more often even though I was submitting sitemaps to Google.which informed it of these updates.

I then started reading about the benefits to businesses of having a weblog attached to the site. SEO’s were and still do wax lyrical about how search engines just love weblogs. On this basis I decided to give it a go and looked around at the various free blog sites and finally settled on http://www.blogger.com as this site allowed the blog to be integrated into the website and offered a multitude of templates to choose from. So I chose my template and went through the process of integration with the website which is a very simple and easy process to follow. The next step was to start writing the blog. Very quickly I discovered that it was the ideal vehicle for announcing new services, new products and new branch openings as well as informing the readers of our day to day activities and experiences. All of it is excellent content and the SEO’s were quite correct in that the search engine spiders do love it. So much so that the googlebot spider visits everyday to update the web pages and the weblog. This now means that when my content changes or new pages are added they are immediately indexed by Google. This has done wonders for the search engine placement of the site.

The second benefit that SEO’s talked about was the increased number of links that having a blog would bring in. This part I didn’t quite believe as I couldn’t see how it would do this. I am still not certain of how and why it does attract links but the truth of the matter is that it does. The articles and the weblog seem to inhabit a world of their own and they certainly take on a life which you have no control over. However the combined effect is to boost your own content, attract search engines to visit your site frequently, increase the number of backlinks to your site and increase the number of visitors. All of which are of tremendous benefit to you as a business.

The latest figures I saw published for the number of businesses with weblogs was only 2%. So all you small businesses out there with a website, get writing articles and add a weblog to your site. Keep that updated, preferably on a daily basis, and you will soon see dramatic effects both on your visitor numbers and your search engine placement.

David Andrew Smith is the owner of Sparkle Cleaning Services a contract cleaning company operating throughout the UK.

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