When blogging first started, it was mostly personal diaries and real weblogs that just kept people updated on things that were going on with a particular topic like the development of software.

Then the opinion blogs came right after that along with the bloggers who became citizen journalists like the Drudge Report.

Now companies have discovered how valuable blogs are as a way to communicate with employees, investors, current customers, and potential customers.

We know all those reasons to own a blog, but something that is not talked about much is how blogs can be used as an SEO tool.

Besides all of the other reasons to own a blog, here are some of the SEO reasons having a blog benefits you.

1. A blog in a folder within your website gives you the opportunity to add fresh new content to your website daily, bringing the search engines back to crawl your website more often and increasing your search engine saturation.

2. A blog on a separate domain name and c class IP block can help increase link popularity for your website by linking to different pages within your website from different blog posts.

3. The best reason to own a blog is that a blog can make you more sales. Every time you post to your blog, you have the chance to sell something. Either by including an affiliate link, using ppc, linking to your products pages, and by directly pitching your products and services to customers.

I may look at things differently than some of you, but from a commercial standpoint, every web page you build is an ad. Not your home on the web. Not your store on the web. Not your address on the web. Every page is simply an ad.

If you think about it, the Internet is the newest advertising medium. When radio came along people were slow to accept it as an advertising tool. When tv came along, advertisers were slow to catch on to that too. Compnies were also slow to catch on to the Internet as an advertising medium.

But even those who do know about Internet advertising, think only of buying links and banners on websites and using google adwords or other ppc programs as the forms of advertising that are available on the Internet.

Most do not really realize that the real ad is the webpage you are building. With organic SEO, you are distributing that ad to more people through the search engines. When you also buy ads or participate in ppc, you are really just paying to distribute your webpage ad to more people.

If that is the case, and each blog post you make becomes a webpage of its own, then every time you make a blog post you are creating an ad.

Now, before you protest, I said this applies to people who use the Internet commercially. People who are selling products and services. If you are a commercial entity, you need to be thinking of every page you build as an ad.

Now, that does not mean you cannot still be helpful and provide useful infomration to people for free. You do not have to build nothing but squeeze pages and landing pages that use a lot of hype and a strong, pushy sales pitch.

Subtly advertising your products and services in the sidebar and at the bottom of each post, while providing helpful information is one of the best sales methods there are. You are providing value to your readers for free. They will want to do business with you as a result.

So, when I say every blog post is a sales page, that does not mean you should write your blog as if you are a used car salesman. Just remember to structure your blog and the posts you make to give you a chance to also sell product. Those pages are found by searchers and you could be making sales.

If you have not done so, I suggest you upgrade to the newest version of wordpress. It doesn’t take too long and security fixes are always worth having.

Before you get started, make sure you meet the minimum requirements (http://wordpress.org/about/requirements/).

Instructions for upgrading your wordpress blog here

Might as well do it now. Don’t put it off until later or if you are like me, it will never get done. I just sent an email to my coder to get this done for me as I wrote this blog post.

If you have not read 10 Ways to Increase Your Blog’s Pageviews – Part 1 you should do that first.

6. Write once per week special projects. These are a series of articles on a particular topic. You will be offering it once per week giving readers a week to comment on it, then have them hanging on for next weeks special post in the series. Each time add links to previous posts in that series.

7. Using your content from your other websites or blogs is also a great way to get more pageviews for all of them. Use the target new tag and refer to material on your other blogs and websites. It will open a new window leaving the current blog open while they visit your other website or blog. You can quickly double up your pageviews while also introducing your readers to your other websites and blogs.

8. Make a list of 10 previous posts and the links to those posts. Make a post in your blog about 10 things you want your readers to know and read in case they have not done so before. At your suggestion they will at least go see if they have read those posts before, increasing your pageviews once again plus bringing old material to new readers. That also lets them know they should browse the archives for things they have missed.

9. Using that same list of 10 posts or a new one, visit other blogs on your topic. Find posts that talk about something similar to one of those 10 posts, then instead of adding a link in your signature to the home page, make a comment there and refer to the post that is similar and that contains helpful information to that blogger and their readers. You will also be increasing your link popularity while doing this. Do not spam the link. Make sure it actually contains useful information. Don’t be trolls or spammers and you will end up with new readers and more page views for your blog.

10. Do not stop being creative. Use the tips in this article, plus invent some of your own ways to interlink your blogposts together. Create pages. Don’t just post and forget. That content is valuable, use it. Do not make people search your blog. They are lazy and busy. Bring it to them. That is just good customer service.

I hope this helps you learn there is more to blogging than just writing a post once in awhile or even daily. If you employ the tips I just gave you into your blog I guarantee you will increase your pageviews which in turn will increase your revenue if using an ad program in your blog.

For those who were beginning to think that the lights were out and no one was home at the ODP, it turns out at least a lone blogger still lives there and has started the DMOZ Blog.

I have to see how long that lasts. So many people are disatisfied with DMOZ that the blog comments are going to be really rough. I hope they chose a blogger with a very thick skin!

Here is what they had to say about the rumors of their death.

With Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher, having people click onto more pages helps your revenue immensely, but how do you get them to read more than one page when they visit your website? Here are a few tips.

1. Create pages within the blog that contain reference material you refer to often in your posts. These static pages will also get crawled and indexed by the search engines and as you write posts about your topics you can refer people to these static pages as references to what you are posting about.

2. Use articles as static pages. You can reprint articles on any topic for free by visiting one of the many article directories like http://www.articlecontentprovider.com/articlesubmit/ Then refer people to read the articles that relate to the post you are making. You could even add one article as a new page every time you make a post.

3. Refer to other posts you have made on your blog or on another one of your blogs while posting. This gets the reader to click over to previous posts. You can even decide your posts by browsing previous posts and deciding which one to follow up on. Those archives are not to be lost and forgotten. Its great material, (you wrote it right?), so use it.

4. Create a page that links to your favorite posts that are timeless. You browse your old posts, find posts that you want readers to find easily, then build a links page with those posts directly linked. Then add a link to that page from your front page. Call it favorite posts or whatever and you will benefit by those that click through and follow those links.

5. I’ve posted before about the “more” tag. You write your post as normal, then decide where you want to break the post up onto a new page. You put the more tag in and readers have to click to a new page to read the rest of the story.

Part 2 tomorrow with the other 5 ways to increase your blog’s pageviews. So subscribe to our feed or bookmark us and come back for more tips on blogging.