Hi All-
Back when I could only find a handful of articles about business blogs, we bought a few names with the hopes of starting our own business blog sites to add to our construction network. A year and a half later, we installed blog software and now post articles. To our surprise (a.k.a. hysterical excitement), the articles come ranked pretty high in the search engines.
For a site that was launched just in January 2005, last month we did 1355 unique, 3280 visitors and 11,225 page views. This is just with your basic free 12 engine submission and dmoz, no ppc, or otherwise, hadn't even had a chance to properly launch with all the hoopla.
Many of the article titles come in at Yahoo #3, 4 and what amazes me is that they are indexed so fast. I posted an article and three days later saw it in Yahoo at #7.
What I find unusual is that 'everyone' talks about what Google is doing with blogs and robots for blogs, etc. but we don't come in too high in Google for our blog articles like we do in Yahoo and MSN.
I didn't mention above that the actual domains come up pretty high as well, but I think that's because we're in an industry that is a bit lagging in the technology field, so we tend to stay ahead of the competition when it comes to
SEO, Advertising and Pay Per Click, etc. for our industry. That's another post in itself.
To summarize, anyone who has a website or wants a web presence and can provide informative content relating to their business SHOULD have a blog and post regularly.