Most people still think that blogs are written by angsty teens pouring their feelings out into cyberspace. And, truth be told, there are many blogs like that.

But a few marketing pioneers have made blogging a new marketing tool, one that helps you connect with your potential customers.

We've written about blogging for business on our blog before, but here's the gist of why having a blog is so important for any small business today:

Blogging Builds Authority

By writing great content relative to your industry, pretty soon you will have built an invaluable resource for your customers.

A blog is a great way to establish yourself as an authority in your field, making potential customers all the more likely to trust you enough to do business with you.

Blogging Makes Discussion Easy

A blog written by a real human comes across much differently than marketing jargon on an impersonal website. If you can write with a personal touch and provide valuable content to your readers, they will look at you much differently than your competitors.

Blogging Isn't Giving Away Your Ideas

The point of a business blog (and all marketing) is to get more business. Once people see how knowledgeable you are in your industry and connect with you personally, they will envision you doing what you do especially for them.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's the process of constructing your website to rank well in the search engines.

Search engines are the first place people go to find business online, so coming up on the first page of the results can have a huge effect on your business.

There are a couple key points of SEO:

Keywords

Writing your content to take full advantage of keywords is an art. Too many keywords and your site will look like spam and be banned, too few and no one will find you.

So for a company that sells pencils, the word "pencil" should factor prominently in the site content, but not too much.

Search Engine Bots

Search engines work by crawling the web with programs called "spiders" or "robots." They take snapshots of each page they come across and store it for searching later.

The way these spiders get from place to place is through links. To maximize your search engine indexing, each page on your site should link to each other page and your keywords should be in the headers of your pages.

Users!

The point of everything is to get a ton of the right people to look at your site, then convert them to customers once they're there.

To do this, you need a usable site that doesn't confuse the readers, and copy that engages them to keep them coming back.

Also, one big part of SEO (especially on Google) is linking. Each link from a reputable site increases the importance of your page in the search engines' eyes. And who decides to make a link to a worthy site?

A person.

Please the people, follow some basic guidelines and your site will do quite well.

You can get a place at the top of the search engines two ways: pay, or rank organically. We call the combination of the two Search Engine Marketing.

Sponsored Links

You can buy the Google advertisements on the top and sides of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) on a per-keyword basis and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

This is known as pay-per-click advertising (PPC). You can also set a budget to cap your spending at a certain limit on a daily basis.

PPC is a great way to drive traffic to your site, as well as control spending. So the pencil store (mentioned in the "SEO" section above) can buy a top link for "colored pencils" and pay the fee only when a potential customer clicks on their ad.

They will target a very specific demographic: people who have just searched for "colored pencils."

Organic Results

PPC is relatively straightforward, but organic results can be pretty tricky to master. The payoff is worth it though: 80% of users click organic results before sponsored ones.

Search engines update their search algorithms frequently to keep their results relevant. Keeping a website on the front page of a competitive search term takes careful monitoring and extensive knowledge of how search engines work.