When we hear the word “blog,” many of us conjure up images of personal information about everything and nothing, detailing our daily life for readers out there on the web and providing expertly taken photographs when we can.  It can seem confusing then, when a website we visit for French pastries in our hometown has a hyperlink for a blog on their website’s menu.  What is this?   A recipe blog?  A blog detailing the lives of employees and owners?  No.  A blog on a business website serves a much more important purpose: making it easy for you to find and visit their website. 

Google's algorithms must search through a seemingly infinite number of websites, both relevant and irrelevant to your search.  Blogs make it easier to be found on Google and other search engines to determine the legitimacy of a website when it comes to your search term.  People on the other end of a website will research commonly used search terms (or keywords, as we call them) and write articles featured on the blog. The keywords will then be hyperlinked back to a section of the website.  The act of writing a blog and creating hyperlinks is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO takes advantage of search engine algorithms to not only increase the quantity of traffic to a website but to increase the quality of that traffic.  What does that mean?  A high-quality website visitor is someone ready or near ready to purchase a product or use a service. Being found on Google is the goal of any website, business or otherwise, and that's where search engine optimization comes in.

SEO is crucial to a website’s visibility.   The idea behind SEO is to target keywords that are highly searched for with little competition.  Using the unique aspects of your business to create long-tail keywords (keywords that tend to bring in high-quality traffic) is one of the quickest ways to get a return on your investment when it comes to website marketability.