Building an Online Business: The Blog

All websites include a blog. People read blogs, keeping them on the website long enough to increase the page rank. They are ‘pinged’ by the blog search engines (and ‘to’ the main search engines) daily. The Big search engines are always looking for the latest info. They go to blogs first.

Blogs increase the number of ‘in house’ links, which work toward increasing page rank. Each one is a chance to control the keywords and even the Adsense ads that appear on your blog.

Blogs increase the number of inbound links. They can be submitted to blog search engines. However, don’t buy links or you’ll lose your page rank level.
Blogs are submitted every time someone writes a new post. In turn, the blog search engines ‘ping’ the big search engines who give the ‘new’ content high page rank for the first few hours.

Pinging

To market a blog properly it should be treated like it is separate from the main website. Google gives links to the home page or main URL very little value. However, links to an inside page have more value. The blog page is perfect to link to.
You can submit your blog manually, but most people don’t. Most choose a service such as Ping-o-matic. Others go to feedburner and set up a feed, then submit to 10 blog search engines.

Submit Blog Posts

Some of your blog posts should be full length, interesting articles. Articles can be submitted to any voting sites: Digg, blogsvines, yearblook, etc.

Comment on blogs

One of the most popular methods of promoting a website is to comment on blogs. You’ll receive a link back attached to your username, so make sure it is a keyword that is promoted on your blog/website.
You should also keep track of the blogs using
Links: http://www.yoururl.com

This tool tells you where you are getting links from. If you’ve linked to a few blogs and none come back, then don’t link there. These sites have no-follow tags. It is hit and miss, but eventually you’ll find 10 – 50 blogs you can comment on. I’ll be talking more about comment ethics in a later post.