Regardless of the type of business or website you operate, maintaining a blog is one of the best ways to gain valuable readership and attract the attention of search engines. However, all too often businesses will concentrate on one aspect of blogging but not the other, not realizing that search engine optimization and readership are - in the end - really the same thing. The following are 5 critical benefits that blogging brings to the business table:

1.) Content

If you know anything about SEO, then you know that it's all about content. Whether you like it or not, in order to appear in the search results in top positions for your keywords, you must produce high quality content. Blogging accomplishes this perfectly because it does 2 critical things:

a.) Provides a method of producing regular, useful content for your site

b.) After indexation content can be syndicated and shared

While it's not entirely necessary to write your blogs with SEO in mind, it is important to know what keywords your audience will be using to find your content, so it's a good idea to put a keyword or two in strategic locations throughout your posts.

2.) Authority

If someone reads a blog post you've written online and finds it to be credible, your name/brand/site suddenly becomes seen as an authority source. The more high quality pieces of content that can be found related to the same subject that are produced by your company, then the more that level of authority will increase.

Authority is a powerful form of branding, and it's one of the most important metrics of SEO and attaining high SERP positions.

3.) Interlinking and OGL

When done properly, a site can achieve a PR3 without any backlinks. This is done through careful interlinking. By publishing blog posts on your site and linking certain terms within the posts to other pages and posts on your site, you'll be helping to tell both search engines and human readers about your company. You'll also be creating related associations by linking out to appropriate sources.

Few people realize the power of interlinking, and blogging is one of the best ways to capitalize on this.

4.) Tags and Categories

Every post you publish on your site creates an H1 title tag, category tags and meta or other tags. All of these are important because they tell readers and search engines what your post - and by proxy your site - is all about. Tags and categories help people find related material quickly and easily, and you can bet that if search engines are able to spider out and do the same on your site, your rankings will improve when done right.

5.) Images and other alternate content

Blogging doesn't just have to be a 500 word block of text and nothing more. Instead, it can be a rich multimedia experience complete with references, images, graphics, videos and more. All of these additional pieces of content add value to your site from a readership standpoint, but it also allows you to flex more SEO muscle in the form of ALT tags, titles, descriptions, etc. And because these additional items are often critical for conversions, if you're not blogging in this way you're leaving money on the table. Don't.

Blogging isn't difficult, but it does have to be done correctly. In order to learn how a blog can improve your readership and SEO, call a professional writer or seo services company now.