Today, I’m gonna stand-up and speak about that ol’ friend we call the blog post – remember, when the majority of us used to blog constantly – until micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter and Plurk came along. I know there are some amongst us that continue to blog, as their main portal for spreading information – and you know what? More power to you, is what I say! Recently, I have witnessed first hand, several clients websites capturing their main targetted keywords from the power of the blogpost. They haven’t bought the services of an SEO company or a link building specialist… sure, they might have done so in the past, but it is only when they turned to producing unique, well-worthy blog content within their site, have they, overtime, at last reaped the benefits they were after all along.
Now, it may be that, the blog posts, where the icing on a very well-made cake, and that they finished off the job perfectly i.e. gained the sites the #1 position for their desired search terms. Like I said earlier, all of the sites have been optimised in the past, but never gained the seedings that the owners desired.
So, I’m going to sit-on-the-fence for the moment, because I am not 100% certain what has made these sites irresistible in Google’s eyes. But they all have some correlation which I feel needs highlighting.
The sites, in question, are over or nearing the 2 years age mark, the keywords that they are now performing to are NOT ‘low-hanging-fruit’, half have had some off-page link building in the past while the other half have been exposed to both on-page and off-page. All of the sites, decided to switch to content generation and blog promotion instead of continuing with a SEO or Link Building campaign. The blog posting was delivered between 2 /3 posts per week (mostly during the 5 working days) NOT everyday and all posts were unique content specific to their niche market i.e. the content was 100% relevant. Finally, the blog posts were promoted via RSS subscriptions and linking on a handful of social media bookmarking sites, some posts were never bookmarked — all posts were never spammed!
I have a test pilot running right now, where the recipe of the website is similar to the above. If it cooks up a number one position in the same fashion then I’m going to get myself a nice big white hat and you can all call me Gordon ‘Effing’ Ramsay 
From now on am going to start chasing keywords that you use as anchor text in internal links: ‘blog promotion’ is now on my list :p only joking- kinda
LOL, its a good keyword to go after Mike, tough competition, the amount of ppc ads running against it is also suprising, but I’m sure we could both be in amongst it in good time
I’ve recently upped the amount I’m posting on our blog. Initially this was because I had a little more time and remembered how much I loved doing it. As I updated more and more we started to show great results for some keywords we had been neglecting.
I’m really enjoying watching the size of our site grow and even more so, watching us get traffic for some random phrases to-boot! Who’d have thought we’d get so much traffic for Kellogs recession
Lynne, I did notice, and quality posts as well coming out of PoLR at the moment – you’se guys are going great guns
I noticed that one site you were working on – the legal related one – is now ranking nicely.
I think getting links via content in this fashion has probably worked because the old gutter link building isn’t working so well now. I’ve seen a number of sites that used brute-force gutter link building that ranked pos. 1 or there abouts 1 year ago tank out big time. So, the thing is with links built via your blog is they are less likely to be from the gutter.
I find the problem is with it though is its not going to build as many links to the pages you really want links to: your homepage and sales-oriented sub-pages. So, like you have said, it can just be icing as your still going to need to plow some links into the homepage and what not.
It shouldn’t be left just to the blog posts, David, that I agree, however, internal linking is just as important and if you also consider that you are basically building deep-linking to within your own site via blog posts that inturn are linked from externally then this does provide a better base for your site to hone in on your keyword specific targets.
Nice post. The SEO value to the micro-blogs just don’t have the juice