Whenever I ask people who are unfamiliar with blogging, they typically have the same impression about what a blog is. They think of blogs as online journals. Places where people bear their souls and talk a little too much about their personal lives. I quickly point out that is how most blogs were started. Then businesses saw an opportunity.

Web sites are often the formal face of the company, while a blog shows a more human side. Blogs allow businesses to interact with their customers and the public in a more authentic way, and it’s also good for business. Search engines are slaves to original content, and blogs are perfect for that.

Recently, I taught a class demonstrating how easy and quick it is to make an entry on a business blog. I wrote a sample blog post about internet marketing. I clicked the publish button and it was online. In about an hour I had a Google alert for that post. That means Google indexed that post barely an hour after I wrote it. Try tracking how long it takes for Google to index a new page on your corporate site. It can take months.

Another benefit of a blog is that each post is a new page of your site - with its own URL. Each page you put online is another opportunity to get rankings in search engines for words that relate to your business. And once set up, a blog requires almost no technical skills to maintain. However, to get maximum search engine visibility, it should go beyond that. For example, it should be integrated with your web site with backlinks using keyword phrases from the blog.

Perhaps the best thing about blogging is that a small business or someone virtually unknown can suddenly become very important. All because of their search engine rankings. And when you rank high in a search engine for a term that relates directly to your business, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Fortune 500 or a home based business. You’ll see the impact.