Attracting Spiders and Bots
As far as search engine optimization - SEO - is concerned, the main purpose of your blog is to get the search engine’s spiders and bots to your website. All you need to do to accomplish that, is to point them in the right direction… they are like sheep, they go where you push them.
They don’t need a focused theme blog to follow a URL to your site, all they need is to find your URL. Like a road sign in the middle of nowhere, if it points to your home, and someone is lost and trying to find your home, if you have a sign out there and they find it, they’ll turn up on your doorstep.
When I started blogging and pinging last July, I was writing articles, or copying parts of my website pages, and pasting them into my blog. Then I would ping my myYahoo account, where I had added my .blogger RSS feed to. It was very time consuming, complicated and frankly it was becoming a pain in the butt… a real chore. However, it was working, and I was getting an increase in traffic.
Then one day almost 4 weeks ago, only 1 week after I had installed a WordPress blog at Training Dog Breeds, I made a change my blog. I added a links menu in the sidebar, which included a link to a brand new page on my website… alsatian dog … and you wouldn’t believe it, but that page was visited by ½ a dozen blog search engines immediately, with Googlebot arriving within 20 minutes.
Now that got me to thinking.
The SE spiders and Bots are looking for only one thing really, links.
I had been posting to my blog every day, so the search engines were visiting every day, and when I posted that brand new URL in my sidebar, they followed it straight to my website. I got Yahoo traffic from that page the next day, and Google traffic the day after that.
So, I don’t blog and ping any more. Manually Blogging and Pinging is already out of date, as far as SEO is concerned.
WordPress pings 45 search engines automatically for me as soon as I click publish. Even with only Pingomatic, you are pinging about a dozen feed sites as soon as you hit the publish button.
With WordPress if you wanted to ping 20 times a day, all you need do is go to your blog and edit one post, change a punctuation mark, anything really. Then, if you have set it up to ping, WordPress does it automatically as soon as you click publish.
Get External Links To Your Site
The second purpose of a blog is to get links, so as to improve your websites page rank… in this case you would have a dedicated blog as a page on each website. I use WordPress, but any blogging software will do, if it allows you to automatically ping. You can use Pingomatic if your Blog program won’t ping for you.
How it works:
Your blog posts need to be of interest to other people, who then link to your Blog… and bloggers link to blogs without even thinking, if the subject or article interests them!
