Walking home from yoga class tonight, I began wracking my brains for ideas to put up on the blog. My thoughts strayed and I reflected (dismally) on how incredibly stiff I had been during the class. I mean, I was so inflexible that I must have looked like a tree trying to do the downward dog. I knew it was my fault because I had missed a week of yoga classes and just hadn’t been practicing on a regular basis. It occurred to me that spending money on yoga classes was a waste if I wasn’t dedicated to a continual practice. The moment I stopped, I backtracked in any progress I’d made. And that’s when it hit me – practicing yoga is just like engaging in search engine optimization by blogging and running a website.

If there is anything I have learned about SEO in the last few weeks of classes, it’s that there is no point in having a website or promoting a company blog if you don’t update it on a regular basis.  It’s a waste of your time, your money, and it’s not bringing you any SEO benefits. In fact, it could even be detrimental to your corporate image. A stale blog may be perceived as laziness or that you don’t care about maintaining an active relationship with your customers. An archaic website is unacceptable in today’s competitive webscape where companies are pushing the frontiers with modern, sleek, and highly interactive websites. If your website looks like it was made in the early 90s, I really think you run the risk of having potential customers question your credibility and capability.

Just as my advice to myself is to continue practicing yoga on a regular basis so that I don’t lose that benefit of any gained flexibility and strength, my advice to businesses looking for higher rankings on search engines is to update, update, and update some more. Regularly updating your websites and continuing to generate fresh content on your blogs will reap you many rewards.

Readers and potential customers will be drawn to you with the expectation of seeing and learning something new. A more personal relationship will develop between web visitors and your company because you have demonstrated that you have a voice and are active in the community – you care enough about your readers to put in that effort to produce new content for them. And search engines will love your efforts and reward you with exposure through higher rankings. Search engines are looking for original, new, and relevant information to present their users. The more you give, the better recognized you’ll be. This is how you will make long strides in your SEO campaign.

Doing yoga everyday is a huge commitment for me and one that I’m still working up to. Blogging everyday seems just as hard! To help you (and me!) along the way, I wanted to see if anyone had some easy-to-follow tips on successfully blogging on a regular basis. I swear I’m not a personal advocate of Chris Brogan but he knows his stuff and makes it so easy to understand. Here are a few of his suggestions and I highly recommend checking out Chris’ post for all fourteen tips.

• Every day find something new to read.
• Brainstorm titles and topic ideas in a notepad file. (He even gives 100 blog topics to get you jump-started!)
• Sit down for 20-40 minutes every day and write (or type).
• Post quickly. It doesn’t have to be perfect. As he says, “perfectionism kills good habits”.

It seems simple enough…why not start now?