I've been a bit busy recently, so have not been blogging as much as my co-workers, but I have been extolling the virtues of blogging to a number of my clients recently, so thought it was time for me to partake once more.

You may or may not have read one of my previous blog posts about how important it is to link to other pages on your blog or website when you post a blog - do you see what I did there? ;-)

Well today I am going to discuss some of the benefits of corporate blogging, and some SEO tips for using it to bring traffic to your site.

I really enjoy my contributions to the Vertical Leap UK corporate blog. It's usually an interesting diversion from some of the more mundane tasks that a day brings (not that there are many in my job, but you know what I mean), and is a forum where you can put your ideas out there.

I regularly look for blogs on all kinds of websites, as I find it a good way to understand more about a company, its approach, ideals and they are usually communicated in a good personable way that allows you to connect to the group. The worst types of corporate blogs are the ones that are blatantly trying to sell a product to you. I think that it is acceptable to announce a new product and talk about new offerings, but I am not so keen on reading a blog that is attempting to lead you to a conversion.

So, my personal thinking is that a blog should be an attempt to engage with your audience in a different way than much of the other content that will appear on a website. I have reasonably recently created 2 blogs for client, one is a recruitment blog, and the other is a travel insurance blog. I think that my clients here have really engaged well with the types of content that I would like to see here, they are providing useful resources related to their industry and providing content that may interest potential customers without trying to blatantly sell to them.

As a result of this though, I can see why some companies may not be keen to introduce a blog on their website. I mean after all, if you can't sell on the blog, then what are you going to do with it?

Well, one thing that it is good for is whats called the "long tail" of search. Its certainly not unusual for a title of a blog that has just been published to be ranking for a that title, maybe even a few hours later - although this probably would not be the case if you were to give your blog a title of a particularly competitive phrase.

Due to how search engines like blogs, they are a fantastic method for raising a company's online profile. They also act as a forum for discussing important developments in any industry, which is certainly part of what we do on the Vertical Leap blog. However SEO often has hot topics of discussion on a more frequent basis than many other industries.

In terms of the SEO, a lot of the benefits for the site will occur naturally if the content that you are writing for the blog is interesting other people. The more read and interesting the content, the more people will naturally link to the blog as a resource of use.

As I have said in a my previous blog on a similar topic, linking to other blog entries or other pages in the site is valuable because blog content is often nicked and displayed elsewhere on the net. If that happens, then you would at least get a link back to your site from it. But another advantage is to use blogs to promote new pages on the site. Blogs are usually crawled much more frequently than other pages of a site, and as a result of this if you link to your new site pages from your blog these are likely to be indexed much more frequently.

Thats me done for now, but I will return soon with some more hot tips, just not sure what on just yet!