You know when people ask me what is blogging my one sentence answer to them is that blogging is actually the quickest and simplest way to get your online message noticed or in front of the audience of your choice. I mean if you are going to be totally honest with yourself the reason why you have got a website is because you either want to be heard (or more specifically you want your message to be read) or you are trying to sell something.
However whether your online web space is just an online platform to voice your opinions or a stage for venting and ranting or on the other hand a commercial endeavor the fact remains that you need an online audience to give your efforts any kind of meaning. Because no matter the nature of your online activity one thing is a constant:
We All Need Web Traffic Online!
Okay now that we agree on the issue of web traffic let me tell you why blogs always beat normal websites (otherwise known as static websites) hands down!
Blogs vs. Normal Websites
Getting Indexed
1. Blogs Get Indexed Quickly By Search Engines Normal Websites Don’t!
Before your spanking brand new web presence (blog or website) will ever get any web traffic it will need to be indexed by the search engines. Okay admittedly there is a bit of a caveat here (an exception) in that by using Web 2.0 or Social Media resources you can actually get online traffic in next to no time for your brand new blog. However that notwithstanding the fact remains that your ultimate goal is to get web traffic from the search engines (also known as organic traffic) because it is the best kind of traffic there is with respect to topic relevance of your blog or website.
Problem is organic traffic is also the hardest to attain but when you do eventually start getting web traffic from the search engines you will realize that it was well worth the effort you put in. How come? Because such traffic is self perpetuating and also free; self perpetuating in this context means that once you attain Google Page One for your most desired keyword, barring total negligence on your part, your blog listing will stay there and continue to attract free highly qualified traffic to your blog!
Now blogs have an immense advantage over normal websites because due to their dynamic nature (dynamic nature in this context relates to a homepage that regularly changes) they get favored attention from the search engines. Such favored attention means that the search engine spiders (those creepy-crawly scripts responsible for traversing the entire internet and indexing web pages) keep returning to crawl your blog more than they would a static/normal website.
2. New Content Added To A Blog Is Instantly Viewable And Picked Up Superfast By Search Engines!
This issue of adding new content to your web space plays out like a double home run for a blog. In fact one could say that perhaps the single most defining feature of a blog is the way in which new content is always added to its homepage (also referred to as the index page). It is because of this particular defining feature that blogs can easily blast their way past older, better established websites that even have many more links.
Here’s how it works:
Picture a search engine spider creepy-crawling along its merry way from homepage to homepage of one website to the next. Now those search engine spiders typically crawl a website starting from their homepage and gradually making their way towards deeper pages. Now the only way in which that search engine spider (or search engine bot) is going to find those deeper pages is if there is a link from the homepage to those inner pages. Problems arise however when you have a normal website that hosts hundreds or even thousands of web pages.
It is totally impractical to have thousands of links from your website’s homepage leading off to its inner pages. But if you don’t have any links from the homepage the search engine bot is going to have an extremely difficult time locating any new deeper level pages. Besides in most cases static websites that have hundreds-to-thousands of pages tend to have them many layers deep, which is to say that those inner-inner pages are linked to the homepage through links found not directly on the homepage itself but rather on another inner page itself.
Generally speaking search engine spiders will only crawl at best three levels deep (if you are lucky) and any pages that are deeper linked will be ignore. Such a scenario would probably explain the dilemma of a webmaster whose static site had more than 200 pages but only had 23 indexed by Google!
Okay let’s look at a typical search engine spider crawl case scenario of a blog. As already pointed, out new content on a blog is by default added to the homepage of the blog and better yet is added to the topmost region of the blog. So the very first aspect a search engine spider encounters on a blog is the newly added content, which if you are not aware, is like honey to a bee.
When the spider bumps into that new content it let’s off a sigh of contentment and says to itself “Yummy, something new to digest. I better keep an eye on this spot!” The more regularly the blog is updated the more frequent the search engine spider will return to crawl that blog. Some blogs are crawled multiple times per day whereas some normal websites are lucky if they are crawled twice a year!
But the same scenario doesn’t play out for normal websites even if you are adding new content regularly because every time the spider returns to crawl that static site it only goes those two or three levels deep and thus never finds that newly added content. Since it cannot find the new content the spider gets the impression that there is little point crawling such a website frequently because as far as it is concerned that website hosts the same old stale content.
Remember I mentioned that the aspect of adding new content is akin to a double homerun for a blog? Well here’s what I meant by that. When visitors come to your site if they like what they find they’ll bookmark it and probably make a point of returning to see what’s new. Now if that site of yours is a normal website and you are busy adding new content pages several levels deep, just like the frustrated search engine spider, your human visitors won’t be able to find that new content and will soon leave making a mental note never to bother returning. I mean let’s face it who wants to return to stale content over and over again?
Oh and on a final note, easily located interesting new content added to your blog will keep your visitors on the pages of your blog for longer, an event that will register favorably with the search engines ultimately enhancing your blog’s ascent up the search engine index pages.
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Ba Kiwanuka is the webmaster of http://www.internetbusinessmart.com
