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Everyone seems to be jumping on the social networking bandwagon, and everyone from Al Gore to Yoko Ono seems to be "Tweeting" and "Blogging" these days. But most businesses have yet to get on board, and many wonder whether blogging is actually relevant or beneficial for their business.

Search engines prefer new content to old, and sites that are regularly updated and expanded get better rankings. Having a Blog is a simple way to quickly add new keyword-optimised content to your Web site, which will help boost your search engine rankings.

Another important factor in determining your search engine rankings is the number of quality links you have from other Web sites. If your content is original and interesting, people will link to your articles from their own Blogs, Web sites or social networking pages, adding to your link count. If you cross-link your posts to relevant pages on your Web site, you can increase your inbound link count further while also delivering more traffic to your Web site.

You can also use Blog posts to provide content that dates quickly or is specific to a certain time period, and for targeting seasonal keywords such as "winter car hire" or "skiing accommodation". This is a great way for you to quickly react to changes in the market and to keep communicating with your customers.

If you want to put a different spin on the name, you don't have to call it a "Blog". Call it your "News" or anything you want - it's the functionality that makes it so useful. Beware: once you've posted your first couple of articles, you might find you're hooked!

Pay-per-click campaign management with Google can be very complicated, especially for someone with little or no experience. There are many tricks of the trade that newcomers have to learn in order to be successful.

One of those tricks is to focus your landing page in order to channel visitors and turn them into a conversion. You are paying Google to put your ads on the top of the page because you want people to visit your site and accomplish something there. You must do everything you can to make that happen.

When someone clicks on your ad, you usually don't want to send them straight to your home page. A home page is usually more generic, has many options, and may overwhelm someone looking for something specific. It is much better to send them straight to what they are looking to find. For example, if they are searching for "piano music" and you are a music site, you don't want them to end up on your home page, which has information about all types of music. Instead, you want to send them straight to the page with piano music on it.

Being able to choose a landing page is really a great tool. Imagine if a regular brick-and-mortar store had this option. Let's say you needed to buy a new computer. So you walk into Best Buy, and right there in front of you are all their computers, lined up nicely on a shelf right inside the front door. The next week you need a new cable for your computer. You walk into the same store, and there inside the door are computer cables on the shelf instead of computers. Wouldn't that make shopping a lot easier and more efficient? You would have no hesitation going to Best Buy again and again for anything you might need.

When you take your potential customers right to where they want to go, your conversion rate will go up. If the goal you set for them is put right in front of their face, they are very likely to accomplish it.

Text on the Web has been boring for too long. There's around half a dozen typefaces that most sites tend to use, so it's about time that the online typeface world gets an upgrade.

There has been a lot of recent blogging about Google Web Fonts. Google Web Fonts is a free open source collection of hundreds of fonts that you can include in your Web pages. From its launch in 2010, the collection has soared to over 400 choices.

Here are some great reasons why you should use Google Web Fonts:

• It makes your site stand out from the crowd

• You can select fonts that better match your real world branding and logo

• It works on all of the main browsers

• There are a wide variety of choices

• It's a free service

• It's easy to do

No.

And yes.

It depends on how you do it.

Some people do it horrendously wrong.

Let's take a look.

Curiosity-Click Traffic is Crap

If one of your primary traffic strategies is to leave fast comments on the posts of larger blogs in your niche just to get a few clicks from the passing traffic, stop. You could get more traffic from one piece of stellar content than months of that type of comment strategy.

And without good content, there's no reason to attract a few "curiosity clicks" anyway. What's going to make them stick around after the click if your content sucks?

Nothing.

Plus, the root motivation for those curiosity clicks is often bad to begin with. The nature of the game makes it that way.

Many new bloggers take the misguided approach of trying to be the first or second comment on every post of a larger blog. They do this because those positions in the comment stream get the most click-throughs, all other things being equal.

The problem is, in the rush for "first," the resulting comments are often incoherent and banal. Sometimes it's quite clear the commenter didn't read the post, or missed the entire point in the hurry for top position.

So any curiosity clicks are usually motivated by "I wonder just how bad this bozo's blog is going to be?" It's true... lame blogs are entertainment for the rest of us.

So, is commenting on blogs worthless?

Nope. In fact, you can actually attract that traffic you want via a smart commenting strategy.

How Comments Can Lead to Real Traffic

So, we've established that great content is rule number one. Without it, all traffic to your blog is pretty much a waste.

Beyond that, the secret to blog comments that ultimately lead to traffic establish...  ...relationships.

Shocking, I know.

Think about it. It's no secret that many of the people who comment on blogs are also bloggers. They simply have more motivation to take the time to comment.

So when you meaningfully participate in the community aspect of a blog, you're creating meaningful relationships with people who can send you significant traffic: bloggers and other active social media users.

Getting links, re-tweets, social media votes and bookmarks... this is the way that content spreads. This is the way you get real traffic that actually matters.

This doesn't entail kissing up to the blog owner (most of us hate strategic-sounding praise). What it means is creating a network that provides the pay-off for all the effort you've put into your content.

It takes time, but at least it actually works.

Can't I be First and Fabulous?

I have seen some people who manage to leave exquisite, meaningful comments who also routinely score the first or second position. But I don't recommend it.

Watching your feed reader or tweet stream that closely throughout the day has got to be distracting. Maybe I'm not as good a multi-tasker, but I find that the higher level of singular focus I place on content development, the better the content turns out.

But that's just my opinion.

So, what do you think? Am I right, wrong, or middling?