The links are important, though. Especially to Google. Yahoo and the MSN Beta seems to give content related factors more weight in my experience. But even with Google the key to your success doesn't lie in links alone. If you want traffic through search engines you must get the basics right too.

So, here's my take on why blogs rank high in search engines.

Keywords, key phrases
Straight to the point
Each post's page structure
Coding
One subject per post
The blog site's information structure
Links then...?

Keywords, key phrases
If I wanted to pick one single reason I would actually choose this one: In a blog you talk. You engage in conversations. You think out loud, in a way. The things you say are (hopefully) everything but the standard corporate bullxxxx. This means you are filling the engines' databases with relevant keywords - relevant because most of us search for the words or phrases we use daily. The same words you use in the blog because you talk instead of sending messages to the target audience.

Straight to the point
How many blog posts have you seen with this kind of headline: "Our software system solution for world-wide data quality"? How many corporate sites have you seen...? This point is related to the first one but it adds one extra dimension. Not only do we in blogs speak like real, living people in the words we use - we say it directly. Straight to the point. There are certainly exceptions to this, I admit that. But generally speaking I have found it to be true in many business blogs. To say what you want to say as fast as possible is important, which leads me to my next reason.

Each post's page structure
It's more or less standard in blog design to use the post's title/headline as the page's title (together with the blog name). With my two previous reasons in mind you now see how the html title is filled with tasty keywords. And that's the most important place to have them. That's where search engines expect to find the best clue to what your page is about, and they rank the words there high in comparison to other positions in the code. Speaking about code...

Coding
If you use blog templates they will probably be an example of good coding. Most I've seen has been at least. It's often a table-less design, an extensive use of style sheets, correct coding where headlines not only are larger and bold but actual H1's, H2's and so on. It's a clean code - good for browser compability, good for visitors with disabilities. Good for search engine spiders. Here you have a potential risk. If you just use the old CMS templates for your regular site, you may loose this advantage. The solution is of course to redesign all of it in line with this "modern" web design.   more »