Blogs are easy to use and can be a very effective tool to help you achieve an amazing boost in your sites search ranking and traffic as well. Using a blog can help you in several ways and it is important to know how to amplify their positive impact on your traffic.
The way a search engine ranks your page is based on a lot of factors, most of them a closely held secret.

One of the factors that is known is how strong your site is linked to from other sites. The logic is that if other sites feel that your site represents a strong product or concept, you become important by association to the search ranking. Establishing these links is one of the most powerful ways you can impact your search rankings and website traffic.
Getting your links set up with a blog is easy and can have a pretty impressive impact fairly quickly. There are several ways of using blogs to establish these links and you should employ all of them to expand the impact.

The simplest way to get started with this is by creating a blog about a keyword topic on your site that you want to improve the search rankings on. For example, if you want your site to be high in the rankings for “kites”, start a blog on kites and be sure to include the keyword “kites” in the title of the blog as well as any other secondary keywords you care about as well. Once this blog is up and running, you need to pepper the blog with links back to your main site. These links can be on the main page of the blog as well as in every article you publish to the blog.
Creating this blog is the first step, but you need to continually keep it updated with fresh and interesting content to keep your readers interested, and keep coming back to visit. Over time you will develop a decent traffic flow to the site, and some of them may click a link back to your site as well. The key here is that every time you publish a new article on the blog; make sure to inset a link back to your site. This increases your link count, and raises your search standing. Also, the more you update the blog, the more often the search engines will index your blog, and this frequency of update is another important ranking criteria.
In addition to your blog, there will be a wide universe of other blogs related to your keyword and you need to find these as well. You can read articles on these blogs and post comments on them, including a link back to your site. As you do more of this, you will get natural traffic from others that read your comments and visit your blog, and hopefully your site.

The key thing here is that these links are indexed by the search engines and help raise your standing. This is an exercise that you can do in your spare time, and costs you nothing but a little time.
Another advantage that hosting a blog provides for you is the fact that as you post more, you soon become an expert on a particular topic. As others in the field recognize your name, your credibility will increase and additional opportunities to publish come your way.

All the online periodicals are searching out content for their publications and usually reach out to experts in the field on a topic. having an article of yours published in these Ezines will help raise your rankings as well, based on the link.
One final place that a blog can help is on social networking sites. When you visit these sites and post comments on a topic, you can link to your blog or website and increase the link count. A lot of these sites will accept submissions of websites or blogs for review on a topic and this can have a very positive impact on both your traffic and search engine rankings if you get listed.

Cory’s prediction has come true — the Internet IS going local. The question is, when will small business owners realize it?

According to The Kelsey Group, “70% of U.S. households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services… Findings also suggest the Internet is poised to surpass newspapers as a local shopping information resource.”

The search engines have laid the groundwork and put some incredible tools in place. Google Local Business Center lets business owners add or edit their company information to Google Local. MSN & Yahoo have their own Local Search offerings. Most of them are free (for now), just there for the taking.

Tell that to small business owners. Try talking to them about local online advertising and this is what you might get:

- “Oh yeah, the Internet. That’s for selling stuff to the world, but all of my customers live here.”
- “I tried the Internet, it didn’t work for my business.”
- “I have a website but it gets no traffic – what a waste of money!”
- “The Internet is for products – I have a service business.”

…and so on. It may be hard to believe, but many of them have no clue how much the Internet could help their business.

Yet they will pay exorbitant prices to advertise in those heavy 20 pound behemoths known as the Yellow Pages.

If you think about it, Yellow Pages are ridiculous: a teeny tiny rectangle’s worth of information that you can’t change for a year, on the SAME page as your competitors’ ads. And for that they charge you hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year.

But the Yellow Pages are familiar, so small business owners stick to it. And since most of the Yellow Pages are online now, many will get basic online listings by default.

Still, it’s a shame that so many small business owners have such misconceptions about the Internet. A lot of that is a due to all the hype and craziness of the early Internet days, when they got sucked into paying huge sums of money for worthless websites that they thought would magically bring customers through their doors. Those experiences left a bitter taste in many a business owner’s mouth, which still lingers today.

Okay, well that was then. It’s time to turn the page and move forward. How can we help small business owners wake up and smell the coffee?

A little bit at a time.

Help your neighborhood businesses get the message. Even if their eyes glaze over when you mention it, tell small business owners some of the ways you use the Internet in your life. If you have family or friends who own businesses, make sure they get their business online.

Encourage every business owner you meet to get an Internet presence — not a glorified brochure, but something that helps them to connect and build relationships with visitors and customers.

Don’t try to convince them, just inform them in a friendly, non-threatening way. Forget the hard sell, especially if you’re in the web design business.

Tell them that if they’re NOT using the Internet to attract and communicate with local consumers, they’re losing money.