Blogging – keeping a regular web log or journal where you write your own observations – can be a great way to increase traffic to your website, since it helps your site get situated higher in Google searches on your topic.

When search engines like Google send their spiders, or computerized scouts, all over the Internet, they’re looking for real-live text content on real-live subjects – and they like it to be fresh. So if your business is web design (for example!), and you post a new short blog article once or twice a week on various and sundry aspects of designing websites, those spiders will find all those interesting words you posted – keywords like “web design”, “website development”, etc. – and will conclude that your website is indeed a good place to find relevant, current information on website design and develoment. Or at least, that your site is worthy to compete with the other 7,290,000 pages that it found on the subject in .3 seconds.

And then, when someone in your town is sitting at the computer using Google to find a website designer, he might just find your site listed within the top page or two of search results. His chances are a lot better if you’ve been mentioning your town and state in your blog posts, and he searches on “web designer, Atlanta,Georgia”. You might also want to include nearby towns, so that when someone searches for “web designers, Dunwoody, Georgia”, they find you. After all, it’s completely legitimate to want to attract customers in your geographical area, and there are people who want to find you.

Blogging takes some effort and commitment, and a website with outdated blog posts on display is a major detriment to your organization. So it’s worth giving some serious thought to whether you really have the time and the desire to write blog posts on a regular basis.

You may have heard that WordPress is specifically for blogs. Straight “out of the box”, a WordPress site prominently features a blog (a space where frequent web-journal entries appear), and many of its features are blog-centered. But WordPress is also perfect for non-blog sites; with a few tweaks, it becomes a regular website.