Search Engine Journal

Great post from Lee Odden today on how blogs and blogging helps the SEO of a site with a blog, or a business using a blog as its main site.

SEO Benefits from Blogs

Here are a few of the ways Lee says blogs benefit SEO:

Crawlable URLs - Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

Inbound link magnet - One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other - much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, thus encouraging links and traffic.

Fresh content - Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.

Active community - Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.

Lee also lists inclusion in popular Blog and RSS directories as a bonus benefit. Do you have any others you would like to add to the list?