Adding a blog to your website is undoubtedly a big decision; but it is something which every company must consider. A regularly updated blog can certainly give people a reason to visit your website more often and there are seo benefits of keeping a company blog as well.

Perhaps you have thought about beginning a blog for your company; but you are not certain it will be worth the extra work. Here is a rundown of seo advantages which will help you out in deciding.

More content for search engines

Most websites have a moderately limited number of webpages and a limited number of words per webpage. Adding a blog means you can regularly craft rich content and as well as include the keywords which you are trying to rank well for in search results. By creating a blog you will be giving search engines more pages and content to crawl on your website; and more opportunity to view your important keywords.

For every blog post that you write; you are giving yourself the opportunity to add content containing five to ten novel keywords. Few of these keywords could actually be longer phrases containing keywords which you are already trying to rank well for in search results.

These longer phrases; called long tail keywords by SEO experts can be easier for you to rank well for. This is because; as a keyword phrase gets longer there are fewer instances of it in search engine indexes. In effect; there is less competition for top rankings in results for searches on those keywords.

For instance; a gardening supplies website could add a blog which offers gardening advice. Perhaps the company wants to increase their online sales of bulbs. Of course; the website will have pages vending out spring bulbs, autumn bulbs and as well as summer bulbs. The blog could also have posts about spring bulb planting mixtures, autumn bulb soil amendments, bulb planting tools, summer bulbs for shade; and many more topics which surround the word bulbs.

Every one of those phrases around bulbs is another keyword phrase. By adding lots of posts which include these phrases; the gardening supplies website would be signaling to Google that it has plenty of details about bulbs. The website’s pages would show up higher in more searches which include the word bulbs.

The more pages of your website that you can get into the top slots of search engine results; the more potential visitors you will have.

Updated content for search engines and as well as people

Search engines do not like it when we allow websites to get out-of-date. Having a blog encourages individuals to update their websites more often.

When a novel URL is added to your sitemap from a blog entry then search engines have a reason to come back to your website; crawl its pages and possibly adjust their rankings of your pages. If your content just sits there and is never updated then search engines have no reason to re-crawl your website.

Updating your blog frequently will give your visitors a reason to return often to view what is new. It gives them a reason to subscribe to your RSS feed as well. If you update your blog with information about your novel products or new uses for your products then you could certainly generate more sales.

Link Power

One of the key elements of seo is links; not just inbound links to your website but as well as outbound links from your website to others.

When you link to other websites; you show search engines that you are trying to offer a good user experience for anyone who visits your website by sending them to other information resources which you have judged to be valuable. Because links are how search engines discover new webpages; you are also doing those other websites a good turn.

You can link to vital pages on your website from your blog. Doing this signals to search engines which pages have information that you think your blog readers will find valuable. While this will not automatically shoot your webpages into the no. 1 spot in search results; linking to pages within your own website will help out search engines in noticing the connections between your pages and their content.

Look out for duplicate content

If there is one thing you must not do with your blog; it is duplicating content from another page of your website or even worse from someone else’s website. Search engines try to evade returning duplicate content in search results. If your webpages are seen as mere duplicates of other web content; then search engines can rank your pages lower than they would otherwise.

There are; however; times when it is helpful for your audience to republish material from another website. This is called syndication. You must always obtain permission from the author and attribute the material to the original resource; with a link back to the original article. Pages with content you have syndicated from others may never rank as well as pages where you publish your own original content but you are providing a good experience to your visitors. This is never a bad idea.

To conclude; a blog is an exemplary way for you to keep your website content fresh, boost up your rankings in search results and as well as give people a reason to visit your website frequently. You do not have to be a slave to your blog and there is no law exclaiming that it has to be updated daily or even weekly. Begin with once a month; and grow from there.

Stay tuned with SEO Global Expert for more updates.

CNET has now released certain data; as they compiled about 100,000 Google results; testing Google.com in March; and then last week; just after the novel update; the data reveals earlier reported data from SearchMetrics in terms of news websites benefiting and demand media’s eHow descending.

One interesting element which CNET’s data brings to the table; however; is that of Google’s localization and their relationship with the update.

“We also tested what happens if you connect to Google.com from an overseas Internet address. We picked one in London. We performed the same searches on the same day–the only variable that should have changed, in other words, was our location,” explains CNET chief political correspondent Declan McCullagh. “The results? Google engages in significant localization efforts, as you might imagine, with Yelp.com being the largest beneficiary by far.”

“In searches originating from the U.K., Yelp appeared only twice,” he adds. “In U.S. searches, by contrast, it was the ninth-most popular Web site, with both its topic and individual business pages weaved seamlessly into the main search results.”

SearchMetrics’ data did exhibit yelp.co.uk as having a 29.59% boost in visibility.

Yelp picked up 45 first-page appearances for generic searches like “cleaning,” “chocolate,” “lights,” “food,” “laundry,” “tv,” and “weddings,” from a California address; according to McCullagh, while Davidsbridal.com, BarnesandNoble.com and Walgreens.com benefited in U.S. from localization as well.

It is not all just big brands though. Local-based results won big as well; based on CNET’s testing; not only local locations for big brands or local businesses; but locally-themed results.

“For our U.S. tests, we used an Internet address near Palo Alto, Calif., which prompted Google to rank nearby businesses and municipal Web sites near the top of search results,” McCullagh explains. “The City of Palo Alto’s Web site appears in the first page of search results for terms including ‘adventures,’ ‘art,’ ‘business,’ ‘gas,’ and ‘jobs.’ PaloAltoOnline.com makes repeat appearances (‘budget cuts,’ ‘restaurants’), as do Stanford, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and Mike’s Bikes.”

It is no covert that Google has put a great deal more emphasis on local in recent time; but it is interesting to view how this is playing out in light of panda update; which was apparently unrelated. We noticed how news websites and video websites appeared to come out as big winners; but this research does appear to indicate even more wins for local.

The benefits to Yelp are without a doubt interesting; considering the tension there has been between Yelp and Google; regarding Google place pages and their use of Yelp reviews. Google’s own reviews system; Hotpot has now found its way into places and right into organic search results themselves.

Google is also finding out more ways to improve their local listings themselves. See the “open now” and local product listings; for instance. Oh, and by the way, Google just launched map maker for US; so users can add their “local knowledge” to the map. Interestingly enough; as Google concentrates more on local; the competition for local eyeballs is already heavily increasing. This is not just about search in the customary sense. You have to factor in entities like Facebook, LivingSocial, Foursquare, Groupon and others in these companies’ respective spaces.

The more ways people obtain the information related to local businesses from resources outside of Google; the less they will have to search for that information with Google.

Stay tuned with SEO Global Expert for more updates.

Demand Media’s eHow’ which escaped wrath of U.S. version of Google’s panda update; to actually get search visibility; appears to have been nailed out as the update rolled out globally and Google made further updates in U.S.

Google has avowed that it is utilizing signals from their domain-blocking features in “high confidence” conditions. Given that eHow is often the topic of complaints from people concerned with search quality; it appears fairly credible that it was a commonly blocked website particularly when you consider how high it has ranked on a number of queries.

SearchMetrics and Sistrix data released this week; looking at UK and Europe has eHow and as well as eHow.co.uk among the top losers of the global panda launch.

Today; demand media’s stock is down -1.36 to 20.17 a share; at the time of this writing.

Tim Chen; a former hedge fund analyst and chief executive officer of NerdWallet; write downs in a Seeking Alpha article; “Demand Media disclosed in their recent 10-K that 25% of 2010 annual revenues ($241 million) were from eHow and that 65% of eHow’s page view traffic came from Google searches…To add a wrinkle to the equation, it also turns out that the average that implies ~$41 million of revenue is at risk, or a $16.4 million revenue impact, assuming a 40% decline in Google search traffic.”

Today; demand media declared that they will be reporting their first quarter 2011 financial results on May 5. We have yet to get comment from demand media on the topic of Google’s algorithm update.

Stay tuned with SEO Global Expert for more updates.

A Google representative told us; “We’ve just streamlined it — we unified the data into one set to make it easier for users to understand what’s hot in Google web searches.”

U.S. hot topics section of Google trends appeared to be wedged on the akin ten for many days. As of Monday; the top ten hot topics were kelly clarkson, radio, beck, shutdown, boehner, shooting, masters, garcia, kyrie irving and anonymous.

Generally; these change frequently all through the day and as we noted, it appeared like “shutdown” would have been gone from the list; considering the government shutdown had already been avoided.

It almost immediately became clear that we were not the only ones who were considering a lack of updating here. We reached out to Google for comment. A representative told us that they would look into this for us; but we have yet to get an explanation. Earlier today; it appeared to be fixed as a novel set of keywords were being displayed related to timely events. However; now it appears to just be gone completely. Instead of top ten hot topics in the left column and the top ten hot searches in the right; there are just top five hot searches in the left column and six through ten on the right.

The search box for searching hot topics is not there as well. It is indistinct whether this is how Google trends will be from now on or if this is only temporary; on a semi-related note; twitter trends are now available in 70 novel locations.

Stay tuned with SEO Global Expert for more updates.

Danny Sullivan interacted with Google’s Matt Cutts and as well as Bing’s Duane Forrester on a panel today at SXSW interactive. Google and Bing on an akin stage without a doubt normally makes for certain truly inimitable search engine-related entertainment. You may recall Matt Cutts and Bing’s Harry Shum bickering about the whole “Bing stealing Google results” ordeal a while back. Today’s discussion was much more tame; in fact; there was no bickering at all irrespective of a brief joke about the Google/Bing debate by Danny Sullivan.

The session took place at a tiny overcrowded meeting room at the Hilton where the seats got filled up quickly leaving probably one third of the crowd sitting on the floor which lead to difficult maneuvering for all those who were trying to work their way up to a microphone to ask questions.

When asked about the JC Penney condition; Matt Cutts avowed; “We’re still taking action.” On black hat tactics, he said that Google’s response (penalties) tend to be “roughly proportional” to how serious the offense is. You might be penalized for 30 days, but if the offense is something that is more obviously deliberate, Google’s response is “going to be stronger.”

To those affected by this penalty; he recommends the old reconsideration request. He avows that he does pay attention to people who tweet him but he would not recommend that as the primary way to carry out things; Duane Forrester’s response was along the akin lines – you can tweet him but it will probably get lost in his timeline.

There was not a lot of novel information given out in the session; though where Google has its classic “more than 200 signals” for ranking; Duane Forrester affirmed that Bing has like a thousand. Not certain if that was a big exaggeration or not. He did not present it that way. It is interesting to note that there could be a difference of nearly 800 signals which the two search engines utilize.

Stay tuned with SEO Global Expert for more updates.

Google declared a redesign for Google profile pages which has a rather familiar look to it. There is a big profile picture in the upper left-hand corner now in a column and user’s series of photos enlarges across the top. Under that; there are fragments for an introduction, education, employment info, places lived and more. You can yet connect the links with which you are associated just like old profiles; there is a different tab for Buzz.

“We think this new design helps highlight the information that’s most important to you, making it easier for people who visit your profile to get to know you,” avows product manager Greg Marra. “As the novel layout gradually rolls out, current users of Google Profiles will notice that their existing profile will automatically update to the new style.”

“Because Google Profiles are designed to be public pages on the web, used to help connect and find real people, we’ll be asking people to provide the name they are commonly referred to in the real world,” adds Marra.

A fascinating side note to this story is that Rick Klau; who was a product manager of Google profiles for the past year is now a product manager at YouTube. He avows that the most notable attributes of the novel profiles design from his point of view are;

- Bigger profile pic – go update yours now! ”scrapbook” lets you pick 5 thumbnails to show on your about page (clicking through will open the pics in full-screen lightbox mode)

- Overall update to the look & feel “About” tab is the default tab (whether you use Buzz or not)

- Buzz users can choose to hide the tab (if, for instance, you don’t use it or just don’t want it shown)

- Several fields have auto-complete (e.g., schools, employers)

- Search visibility is controllable: you can choose to prevent your profile page from being indexed

Klau avows that once they got the profile to code completion a few weeks ago; he moved over to YouTube. “I’m now a PM at YouTube, where I’m responsible for the homepage, YouTube’s social strategy and a variety of other related pieces,” he wrote on his blog. “Leaving the Profiles team was a very tough decision – I loved working with them and am eager to see the next set of things they launch.”

Klau’s knowledge of profiles and his new position could be an important part of Google’s overall social plan. YouTube is without a doubt Google’s biggest social media asset; it is even often referred as the second largest search engine. YouTube integration will likely be a big part of that plan along with social search which the company lately updated. I think Gmail, blogger, docs and reader will have important roles as well.

Google has been hinting at a “social layer” which will be added across to many of its products in a little while. The Google profile will likely be the center of all that much like the wall/newsfeed for facebook; it will be fascinating to view how Google handles the promotion of it.

Google lately rolled out a new top navigation bar as well across few of its properties which is probably also related. This is just conjecture but the social layer is expected to come up in form of a toolbar.

When a person asked Klau in the comments of a Google Buzz post if this is “THE big one or just part of the overall revamp of social across all of Google’s services”, Klau responded, “Now that I’m at YouTube, one of my responsibilities is ensuring that we do the right thing w/regards to social features and the YouTube community.”

We are yet very interested to view how Google evolves in the realm of social media while facebook evolves in the realm of search.

Marra avows that Google will continue to look for ways for businesses to utilize Google profiles. There is a good chance that Google is already an important part of your business marketing plans; so watch out what Google does with the profile.

The novel profiles design is in the process of rolling out. If you are not able to view it then you will definitely in a little while. You can go to profiles.google.com to view your profile.

Stay tuned with SEO Global Expert for more updates.

Google announced a novel Google maps feature today; linked to the company’s recently launched Hotpot social recommendation products. All thanks to this novel features users can search Google maps plus request results based on the recommendations of particular friends.

“Most of us know lots of friends, each with very different areas of expertise when it comes to places to recommend. With the recent launch of Hotpot, we made it easy for you to see your friends’ ratings and reviews listed right inside search results,” says Hotpot engineer Daniel Yehuda. “While this is really helpful, and we’ve had a lot of fun with it, we often found ourselves wanting to see all recommendations by a particular friend for a particular search. Problem solved…”

“Say I’m searching on Google Maps for ‘Italian restaurants’ in New York,” Yehuda explains. “I’d probably trust my buddy Octavian’s recommendations over Bernhard’s (who is more of a hamburger guy, really). Now all I have to do, to see Octavian’s entire list of Italian restaurant recommendations in the city, is click on his name when he pops up in my initial search; this filters my search results to only those he’s rated and shows them on the map. It’s like I’m seeing the world, through Octavian’s eyes.”

The feature is available for desktop version of Google Maps and as well as for Android version.

Now; it is going to help out if your friends are actually rating restaurants by utilizing Hotpot. There is possibly a good chance that they are not and the feature is not going to be very useful without your friends. It remains to be witnessed just how big Google will be able to take Hotpot; but there is no question Google is putting great deal of concentration on it these days. Actually; Google is putting lots of emphasis on local search in general and with Marissa Mayer (who until lately was Google’s VP of search plus user experience) running the whole process in this area; it is not hard to witness a product like Hotpot gaining certain steam.

Stay tuned with SEO Global Expert for more updates.

As you might have noticed; Google has been putting a lot more emphasis on local nowadays as compared to past years. This consists of everything from introduction of Google places plus place pages to automatically exhibiting more local results for certain searches; and various other plans provided to businesses at local level; like tag advertising or product inventory; Google caters a lot more to location based search plus local business search than ever before; and this trend will probably continue.

We checked with eminent seo analyst Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc. regarding search trends plus where the search industry is headed. “Certainly the enhancements have been gradual…now, anybody that has a local result, the first organic link is down below the fold,” says Clay. “I never expected that to happen…the organic links, they’re gone. For the last four or five months, I’ve been saying that the new page one in the search results is really positions one, two, and three. That is page one. And I think Google agrees.”

“If you look at some of the results, our benchmarks have shown that commonly, there will be seven organic results on the first page, and sometimes as few as four results that are organic on the first page of the Google results set – right now,” he says. “So does Google owe any loyalty to what is traditional organic? Of course not. Now, the argument I would say for Google, is that if they’re gonna throw up some local results, they’re gonna argue that those are organic, and that they’re more targeted to location, and therefore that they’re more relevant to the normal organic results, in which case they’re carrying forward with organic results. It’s just that they’re not organic like anybody in the SEO space has ever thought of before.”

So search engine optimization webmasters plus businesses really have to mull over how the search engine optimization game has altered in this way. You cannot expect individuals to go past the first page of results. It takes place but I am guessing it takes place less and less as individuals adjust their queries to find what they are looking out for when results do not offer it. The addition of Google Instant has without doubt just fueled this.

Stay tuned with SEO Global Expert for more updates.