Blogging is a great way to get more traffic to your site and communicate with the community interested in the same topics as you.
Search engines such as Yahoo! and Google love blogs because of the fact that articles written in blogs are mostly up-to-date and they get the information about the update of a blog really fast using RSS Feeds and Pings. Articles posted on a blog with these two options in place can get into the search engine indexes within hours, sometimes even minutes.
So, let's see what we need for a site to be considered a blog, or to have a special blog section:
- Regular updates
- Chronologically ordered
- Commenting option
- RSS Feed and email update
We will work through these options to get you blogging with Joomla!.
I will give a short introduction to Joomla! blogging components at the end of this chapter just to show you an alternative. After that you can decide for yourself if you want to use them, and if they are worth the money spent. With a blog component, you still have to go through the basics of setting up a blog.
Using a blog has some advantages that fair really well if you want to have more visibility in the search engines. We will be looking at some of those advantages and how they can affect your search engine rankings. I am not saying blogging is easy, but it is very rewarding.
Creating short articles about your favorite topic and publishing them on a regular basis is the best way to get into the search engine results pages faster.
The number one thing about blogging is that you can write long articles or short articles. The combination of the two different formats won't break the flow of your site, unlike a normal web site, where you mostly write articles that are built with a certain length. You can also state an opinion about things that are going on in your community and write news items. All that in one web site without worrying too much about how to structure all the information.
I told you in an earlier chapter that you need a structure for SEO and that Joomla! will force you to use the structure you have chosen for your site. Using Joomla! as a blog will make it easier for you as you will be using the categories created in advance to hold that information for you.
If you set up a blog and start using the sites and services we will be looking at, like FeedBurner and Technorati, you will notice that the major search engines also use these services to index blog sites and find new posts really fast. Now Google even owns FeedBurner! You will not only syndicate your articles using options such as RSS Feeds, but you will also push your articles through Technorati, the number one site to show your blog to bloggers.
Google has a special tool with some basic categorization in place for searching blogs; you can find it at http://blogsearch.google.com.
One good thing about this blog search tools is that it will show you how "old" a blog post is. For example, under the title you will see a statement such as 10 hours ago just to prove how fast you can get an article indexed from a blog.
