We have had a great many hesitant emails asking us, 'what is all this Blogging business about?' Even though by reading this very blog you are seeing one for yourself, it can be difficult to grasp how they work and what good they do.

A blog is basically a very simple website used for sharing news, information and opinions. There are two important and exciting things about blogs (which is why they are causing such a stir):

• They are crawled and indexed by search engines; viewed as 'news' blogs can do quite well when it comes to search result rankings, making them a useful (and often free) marketing tool.
• Because they are websites, links from a blog can improve the page rank of another website, making them useful (and often free) marketing tools (are you seeing a theme?).

If you are considering setting up your own blog, just keep in mind the optimisation rules you would apply to a web page.
For a more detailed description of blogging visit the Web Certain Secrets newsletter.