Every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it’s optimized and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is. But in general, most pages do “ok” and contribute to the cause, so it’s both a quality and a quantity game. The more content you have on your site, the more there is for Google to search through and catalog and the more likely it is that someone will try to link to your site because they found something worth linking to. The word blog has been misused a bit over the years because people picture want to be journalist writing articles about food they liked or products they didn’t, what it really should be looked at is a way to create content that people will want to come back to and share with others again and again. So whether you call it a blog, a product showcase, a newsletter, a press release, a customer support forum, a favorite’s list (ie, recipes, books, product reviews, etc) or even a what’s new section, at the heart of it means you need to create something of value for each site that makes it more than just a glorified catalog of your companies products or services. This is really the best way to get links legitimately because you are telling Google that you have more to offer than other sites and businesses in your industry.
The reason why most business sites have blogs, a products listing and or regularly updated newsletter is not because they actually want to be news people or even have the time for it, it’s because it creates content for them that can be considered valuable and will be used to allow people to link more and more to their site. Some businesses like answers.com and amazon actually look at Google keywords using tools like the AdWord Key Word Tool before they create a post or product page in order to enhance the page’s individual SEO rankings based on the key words they are looking for and search for the ones that are less competitive to go after. It’s a lot easier to market to a bunch of key words at the bottom of the spectrum that to focus on a single overtly competitive keyword to go after.
A service business can create a blog where they can talk about things happening in their industry, a products business can create a review section where people tell them what they think of the product or in the case of business to business provide automated quotes for wholesale purchases like Alibaba.com did. Each blog post doesn’t have to be more than a paragraph per post but it pays dividends because people may be searching for something that doesn’t even come close to sounding like the title of your site but if they find that one niche post that talks about what they are concerned with then you have their attention. If that same post happens to be on the same site where you’re selling them a product or service that fits close to what they needed even better. A lot of sites also use blogging systems as a way to augment or help customers in finding out more information about their products or telling them product issues that they are having, again all of this creates content. Great sites usually have thousands of pages for Google to catalog and retain a much larger audience by shear content numbers. Either way the more stuff you put on the site the more valuable content you can give Google. Next we will talk about Optimizing your SEO.