Best practices for SEO Blogging?

[clickagent75]

We're about to add a blog to our ecommerce site and wanted to find out if there are any best practices we should be aware of?

The purpose of the blog will be to:

- Increase SEO efforts
- Improve visitor loyalty
- Provide our customers a channel to communicate back to us (via comments)

Is there anything we absolutely should NOT do? Any tips?

We're thinking of using blogger.com

[rustybrick]

Yea, don't use blogger. Go with wordpress or movabletype.

[David Wallace]

The main ingredient for an effective blog is to provide quality content. That can be easier said than done. Also use effective titles, balancing the use of popular keywords with titles that will intrigue interest.

[Carlos Chacón]

Talk, don’t sell.

[clickagent75]

Any reason why Blogger is not best suited for SEO? Just curious.

As for content, we're still trying to figure out the best editorial path to take. Whether to do product reviews (that our customers have asked for), or related topics. But definitely won't use blogs for a hard sell technique.

Can anyone atest to blogs significantly contributing to their SEO efforts?

[LawyerMike]

I can attest to blogs working for SEO, at least wordpress. I noticed that I made a very common mistake in spelling a word, online defamation. I spelled it one time in one blog posting "online defemation" This is very common, at least I find with my clients when they email me. I ran a search for this spelling in Google and found my blog entry listed as the #1 result in the SERP.

I have also received 2 phone calls from perspective clients over the past two weeks for online defamation cases, and when I asked how they found me, they said they searched on Google.

I have also noticed several comments on my blog from people I do not know, thus my blog must be getting some presence in the engines, or at least Technorati.