When it comes to SEO, one of the most important things you can do for your site is to have a blog. My personal favorite is a hosted WordPress blog. The benefits surpass my list here, but this is a good place to start:

1. You can have your own domain name, which can include keywords and helps with keyword searches in the search engines
2. WordPress is built to be search engine friendly. Use keywords in your Page Title, which is used in the permalink and becomes the link throughout your site and the link featured in search engine results.
3. Countless customization features, including your own look and feel and enhanced functionality
4. Engage your readers with regularly published posts. This is a good time to establish a strategy so your readers are excited about what you’re writing every week.
5. Establish a list of strategic keywords, what I like to call a keyword legend, and use 3-5 of your keywords in each of your posts. This will help search engines see your page for those keyword searches. Place your keywords in the Page Title, in Heading tags (i.e. <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, etc). Link to other parts of your site using those keywords (like you saw me do with “keyword legend”).

I recently put a blog on Big John’s Garden‘s website to help boost his ranking in the search engines. I saw an opportunity to replace his “News” section, which was a static page of updates from the past 4 years. This static page didn’t benefit him much because he didn’t have access to update the site himself, the search engines saw this page a single page that is only updated a couple times a year, the products weren’t linked to the store, and the page was difficult to read since it scrolled within a confined space.

The static news page was replaced with an integrated WordPress blog. Each of the updates were moved into separate blog posts. Each post date is consistent with the original publication date. For example, the news update that was posted in November 2010 was added to the blog, as a separate post, and the publication date was modified to be November 2010. Each post has a reference to a unique product that he’s selling and since the goal is to drive traffic and convert that traffic to sales, each of his products were linked to that particular product in the store. The interlinking helps search engines see the full content of the site and also helps readers quickly access the products for purchase. Now that each post is separate with dates, they can be archived by date, so readers can search posts by date. Also, each post is keyword searchable, so if the reader is looking for information about “garlic“, just type that keyword into the search form in the news section and all posts that are relevant to that keyword will come up. Now the search engines can see 30 unique posts all of which are search engine friendly, instead of one static page that is hard to see updates on.

This change was made 3 weeks ago, and I’m already seeing his site rank higher and his visitors are accessing the store more frequently now then they had the month prior.