Blogs and blogging has evolved into a huge phenomenon over the last few years. Technorati, a U.S. based blog search engine, is currently tracking over 112.8 million blogs, a number excluding the more than 75 million Chinese blogs acknowledged by The China Internet Network Information Center.

The term 'weblog' was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger in his Robot Wisdom Weblog. The short form, 'blog', was coined by Peter Merholz, breaking word weblog into the phrase 'we blog' in 1999. Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used 'blog' as both a noun and verb ('to blog', meaning to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog) and devised the term 'blogger' in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product.

According to Yahoo! a weblog is usually defined as 'a personal or non-commercial website that uses a dated log format (usually with the most recent addition at the top of the page) and contains links to other websites, along with commentary about those sites. A weblog is updated frequently and sometimes groups link by specific subjects, such as politics, news, pop culture, or computer issues'. Whilst this is still largely true, the commercial uses and applications of blogs are growing rapidly.

This growth has been largely driven by the release of free weblog-creation programs in 1999, before which most weblogs were hand-coded by web developers. Blogging rapidly turned into a hugely popular pastime. Programs like Blogger (purchased by Google in February 2003), Wordpress, Drupal and Expression Engine have made it simple for anyone to create their own weblog.

Blogger was released in August 1999, its ease of use making it immediately popular. By October 2000, Blogger users were creating 300 new blogs a day; the 10,000th Blogger weblog was created by November of that year. These days Wordpress, which started in 2003, is the most famous and widely used blogging platform. It is used on hundreds of thousands of sites and is seen by tens of millions of people every day. In 2007 Wordpress was downloaded a staggering 3,816,965 times. That it is open source with no licence fee and features an intuitive web-based installer (so anyone from a novice to an expert can quickly install the software) has contributed largely to its adoption. Numerous international organisations take advantage of its features and ease of use to publish their own blogs. They don't get much bigger than Ford and the New York Times.

Wordpress has one of the largest and most passionate communities of developers and users, its popularity now even 'rewarded' with a 'Wordpress for Dummies' guide.

Whilst many businesses jumped on the blog train and developed them as a means of generating communication with their customers, it wasn't long before site owners and SEO professionals spotted the positive effect that blogs could have on inbound links, traffic, ranking and authority.

Blogs naturally attract search engine traffic. In a world of search engines hungry for relevance, blogs offer organisations enormous opportunities to inspire and attract traffic through shrewd SEO. Blogs have already optimised site architecture. Search engines see relevance as a product of great content regularly updated, robust structure and transparent architecture, as well as the quality of inbound links. Perhaps the most effective contributions of blogs in the context of SEO can be in how they can assist improving inbound links. Blogs enjoy the inherent potential to be well linked to and from.

Here's a short list outlining some of the issues we consider at SEO Consult when integrating blog SEO with our clients wider SEM strategies:

• Choose the right blog software or custom build. It's important to identify the best CMS that's most flexible and useful for each project. A solution that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to blossom. How do you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate? In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but on occasion a custom option is specified.
• Host your blog directly on your domain. A blog hosted on your domain can attract and pass on links, attention, publicity, trust, authority and search rankings. We recommend that third party hosted domains and redirects are avoided.
• Participate. Using Technorati or Ask.com's blog search, we identify blogs that exist in our client's industry or niche. Networking, friendship, befriend and community are important components of any successful blog presence.
• Use more than just simple text. Blogs that contain nothing but text are more difficult to read and often less consistently appealing than those that offer some form of image, interaction, the occasional multimedia content or charts and graph elements. Even formatting the text creatively using block quotes and bullet points can add a little life.
• Link intelligently. When clients link out in their blog posts, we encourage convention where applicable and creativity when appropriate. Though there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking, it's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. Quoting other bloggers or online sources without linking to them is considered bad etiquette that could cost you links from those sources in the future.
• Think open source, share and share alike. The blogosphere exists with the idea of an open source world on the web. If (without totally giving the shop away) you can offer trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, or technical advice for example on a blog of genuine worth to visitors in your field, your community will reward you with links and traffic.
• Brand building. This is possibly the most important aspect. You need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Define your brand in a way that's comfortable for you and in a way that has value and resonance for your visitors.

At SEO Consult we've applied our experience and expertise to numerous SEO/Blog campaigns. For more information on any of the approaches listed above or indeed anything to do with SEO and Internet strategy, feel free to Contact Us.