A blog or advice/article section on your website is a great way to grow your website, and provide fresh content for your visitors to check back on. But how can this benefit SEO?

It's always exciting when you launch a new website, however over time it can be tough to know how to grow your website; to know how or where to provide fresh content for your visitors to check back on. This is where having a blog or advice section can be of great use.

Today, blog and advice pages are found across websites from a variety of industries. They are used and displayed in a variety a ways, however with one common intent – to provide fresh content.

Having a blog or advice section provides the freedom to write new content on topics closely related to your industry and your website; not only to inform and advise your customer/client base, but to communicate your expertise more effectively. Naturally, by adding new articles to your blog or advice section over time, this increases the amount of content that is available to both your target audience, and to search engines.

Here are just a few of the SEO benefits for having a blog or advice section on your website:

1. Search engines like fresh content – A regularly updated website tells search engines that it is an active website, with new content to offer. Search engines (like Google), aim to provide fresh and more recent search results.
2. Give search engines a greater understanding of what your website is about – new articles can be written to compliment and provide additional information about your services or areas of expertise.
3. Expand the amount of keywords you can target – new articles will allow you to target keyword phrases that are not covered elsewhere throughout your website.
4. Build a following who will share your content – aim to create informative and interesting articles, which will compel your website visitors to share the information elsewhere on the web. Not only will this attract new visitors to your website, it will also build the incoming links into your website, which can boost your website credibility and rankings in search engines.

If you write articles for your website, which then appear in the search engine rankings, ensure that what you write is genuine and engaging to your target audience, otherwise any search engine traffic you receive to these articles are likely to be wasted. Put your website visitors first before thinking about the benefits of SEO.

The above are what I would say are some of the key reasons for starting up a blog or advice section on your blog to benefit SEO, however I'd be interested to know your thoughts or if you think that are any other key benefits which I've not covered…