I have a passion for internet marketing....and blogs are a HUGE part of that. Blogs are very easy to put up and extremely easy to SEO for almost any local keyword you are after.
And they are a GREAT way to get back links to your main website.
As an example: Let's say you want to get ranked for upholstery cleaning in your area. With a blog you could EASILY be ranked for "upholstery cleaning your city and state" within a day or two. You could write a post on why it is important to have your upholstery cleaned and what the client should look for in a good upholstery cleaning company.
Now...when you write that post you want your headline to have the specific keywords in it. And you want the very top part of your browser to say "upholstery cleaning your specific city and state." This makes it very easy to get that specific article ranked on the first or second page of Google or Yahoo or MSN.
You then want in that post "anchor text" to your upholstery cleaning websites page.
Example: You would not want to say to do this: For the finest in upholstery cleaning in such and such city visit us at
ABC Carpet and Upholstery Care. That is the wrong way to do it! You want the link to say the anchor text you are after.
Here is the right way to do it: For the finest in upholstery cleaning in such and such city visit us at ABC Carpet and Upholstery Care. You could have a link be "upholstery cleaning in such and such city" and you could also have a link from ABC Carpet and Upholstery Care to your home page. The link from "upholstery cleaning such and such city" would go to your upholstery cleaning page on your main website.
That is a far
superior way to do two things. One is to get your upholstery page ranked high, which is just a good thing. The more pages on your site that are on the first page of Google, or the others, is a really good thing for you. The other thing is that your blog will then get ranked high.
Of course you can also have a blog attached to your site which is what I think Mikey has but it would be better to have the blog seperate, especially if your main site is already ranked high.
When you link from one site to another you want to use keyword anchor text.
An example of how powerful anchor text is Adobe. If you put CLICK HERE into Google you will see that Adobe comes up first under click! Do you know why? Because so many sites are linked to Adobe and downloading through reader with the anchor text CLICK HERE!
So use your anchor text wisely.
Wordpress is very easy to work with for the most part. Also, Blogger is easy to use.