Social media keeps rising in popularity. Just about everyone is on Twitter and Facebook these days. More people are jumping onto Tumblr to share even more content, so should we even bother will more full-blown blogs anymore? Internet entrepreneur Neil Patel certainly thinks so.

In a recent post on Search Engine Journal, the KISSmetrics founder outlines seven different reasons why blogging is still important in 2012. One of the biggest reasons is that a powerful blog will always serve as a great foundation for all your social media activities. Even if you are very active on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook, you still want somewhere that you can direct that interest and traffic.

A blog can do that. It's your home base and it's where you can drive that attention. By having that home base, you are better positioned to build your brand as an expert, build trust among your readers, and establish your legitimacy. Otherwise, you've just got pieces scattered all around the web with nothing to hold them together.

And let's not forget about the SEO benefits too. Sure you can have some eyes on your Twitter stream, but a consistently updated blog is a very good thing for search engine optimization. Google smiles upon dynamic content that is actually useful and having a blog keeps those spiders and bots coming back, better indexing your material and sending more organic traffic your way.

Blogging is still important and that's half the reason why we keep blogging here on Gseo. Do you keep a blog? Why or why not?

Why Blogs are so Important

Many experienced internet marketers have talked about why blogs are so important for business owners, affiliate marketers, artists, authors, etc. They definitely have a good point. The amount of blogs growing on a daily basis is mind boggling. Blogs are crucial for business owners if they want to build an online presence quickly. Blogs with an RSS feed are lead magnets. Even though there are an increase in blogs, there are still a lot of business owners who are hesitant to use blogs and are happy with having an ordinary website created.

What are Blogs Anyway?

Blogs are a content management system with a website template. Blog owners use them to express themselves in anyway they desire. Anyone can create a blog and there are a large number of free blogging platforms around. Because people have a lot to say, they will create their own blogging accounts and begin to create blog posts. Others online can interact with the bloggers and share their views on whatever was expressed in a blog post through commenting.

Why do Businesses Need Blogs?

As previously stated, blogs are meant to attract traffic which will in the end convert to new clients or customers. Nevertheless, if you had created a blog a year ago and only wrote two posts, you will receive very little traffic. Whatever traffic you would receive would not likely convert to clients or customers either.

That is one very significant reason to important to update blogs at least three times a month. Search engines are immediately notified when you do update a blog, and that by itself will help your blog rank higher.

If you post often on your blog, that is going to help you in many ways. You will not only attract loads of new traffic- but if you already have an audience, they will want to keep reading your posts.

Blogs are also essential for being used to help business owners build his or her reputation in a niche. The more the blog grows, the more business owners can demonstrate their knowledge in which ever field they have chosen.

To conclude, this is why blogs are going to help business owners gain more traffic and clients than ordinary websites. Ordinary websites lack RSS feeds and there is only so often they can be updated. With a blog, there is no limit on how often new posts are created. Because search engines love new content, a blog that is updated often will rank very high on search engines. Ordinary websites have a tougher chance of ranking high for that reason alone.

The are lot of speculations going on in the SEO world. There have been a lot of predictions for 2010. The big question now is will the microlinks gain importance in the eyes of Search Engines ?. Blogging has changed from Megablogging to Microblogging. Twitter and Plurk are the most famous microblogging sites. While twitter has build up a strong presence in the Internet social media world, plurk has build a strong presence among Asia social media users especially users from Taiwan. My answer to the question is that there is high chance that Google starts giving more weightage to twitter microlinks as Google has already started to track the real time mentions. They have started showing the title as well as homepage of the website that is tweeted as microlink using bit.ly or using URL's shortened by other microlinking websites.This is a great sign that the tweets might pass some significant data that might be taken into consideration while search engines compute SERP changes.

Now the most important question comes up as how Google will determine which tweets are more relavant and which are not that relavant?. I would have to say that Google will use a similar meterics which they have been using for website relavance. Google has been using a concept like a webpage becomes important as more and more external webpages links of which more authority webpages are giving the links which have more number of backlinks. The same principal might be applied in the case of twitter profile. A twitter profile will get more authority if a lot of twitter profiles link to the particular twitter profile of which some of them are most famous twitter who have lot of followers and who follow a few. This will really make search engine conisered the twitter profile as a priorirty one and the tweets will get more importance.

Here is supporting view.

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well". Read more here

In terms of blogging, we're not limited into one type. The fact is, there are blogs with several types. No matter what type of bloggers we use, they publish their content on topics and issues which have passion about it. Several bloggers are just writing on what might interest them. Business-oriented blogs are more often focused into one topic they need to emphasize their products, services and offers.

Blogs can cover mostly wide range of topics. Several people are getting interests to blogging right now. They earn cash through expressing their feelings or advertise their products or services. Blogging is one of the new methods of earning income at home or in an internet cafe. Being a blogger brings enjoyment and happiness to several bloggers for sharing their opinions and thoughts to others and receive advice from them too.

Several businesses are beginning to explore the world of blogging. This is one of the excellent opportunities for them which it was a great medium of communication. Business-oriented blogs are earning benefits from SEO advantage, which is one the biggest leverages on being a blogger.

If your business has a website that promotes products, services or offers in any type of content, it will serve as a vehicle to drive your business to another level. Right now, blogs are very useful because they are text-based databases, compared to the content of a traditional website. It means that blogs are minimizing the crawling time to various search engine spiders like Google, and to allow them retrieve other information about the page much faster.

Blogs are very dynamic, which can be updated more often. If you publish your contents frequently, search engine spiders like Google will visit your blog more often. It results to your blog that can have as many pages being sent to various search engines, compared to its competitors. If the competitor has a static website, it will be much better. It provides blogging opportunities to reach out as many potential customers as they want while increasing their revenue.

Blogging has different reasons for each blogger who is relying on for what purpose? There could be two reason why you should blog? Could it be:

a. For passion?

b. For money?

c. For nothing?

We'll, let's talk about these things that I've mentioned if you are blogging on any topic you want. There are differences between these three:

1. If you are blogging for passion, it's an advantage. When you blog for passion, you have some interests on the subject you want to create a topic, and you write it in your own words with a dedicated attitude. Money is still what you need, but you won't earn it much without passion. Uniqueness, no errors and creative design will attract more people than to blog just for the money.

2. If you are blogging just for money, it means you're in a complete hurry. You are not dedicated on what you write and what you are interested in, but just for making money without passion. If you do that just for money, you will not be benefited for long and the impression of the audience or the reader itself to you will not be a good one and they won't recommend your blog to others. This can only be done if you have no passion about blogging.

3. If you are blogging just for nothing, you're an idiot. Why? This is much worse than blogging for passion and for money because we can see that if you blog just for nothing and don't care about passion and money, you could be out of this world and better not to blog if you do it for nothing without good value.

So I would like to remind everyone, especially bloggers, that you must do this for both passion and money, not to stick with just one attitude and dedication. If you will only blog for passion, you may be benefited but the money you want is not there. If you will only blog for money, you may earn money but your target audience won't last long. If you blog neither of them, you're a complete idiot. Better blog for both passion and money.