We are often asked to explain to clients why they should start a blog.

 The answer is pretty straightforward.

Each blog post basically acts as a perfectly optimized new page on your website.  If you blog about things that are relevant to the content on the more static pages of your main site and link to them frequently, it can have quite a dramatic effect on the amount of traffic you get from natural search.

You can improve this still further by linking and creating trackbacks within each post to other relevant and useful articles and resources.  And you can comment on other articles and blog posts that may be similar or relevant to your own post, thereby creating a matrix of links that becomes powerful in terms of Google friendliness.

This is just the basics.  There are many different things you can do as well, from blogrolls, to getting listed in blog directories, to syndicating your content, to hosting guest bloggers….

From a technology PR point of view of course, the blog becomes a natural extension of the PR program and helps companies be seen to have an opinion and to demonstrate thought leadership.  2010 is looking like the year of the blog for many of our clients who having shown scientism are now showing how well they can be done.