I did a detailed research on writing a blog and its relationship to the search engine crawlers. This research started three months back and concluded yesterday with a series of four quick posts made within the span of two to three hours each.
The idea was to find out the behavioural pattern of the crawlers from the search engines. The exact tests and the results are given below.
Once I started writing one or two posts a day and continued that trend for two weeks, I noticed that the crawlers were coming back to our site every two hours.
After the two week period, I gave a gap of one week and blogged only once in a week or 10 days. At that point, it took about two to three days for the blogs to show up on the site.
Then I started blogging again almost every day and we realized the crawler was back almost every day. I kept reducing the gap and yesterday was the final test where I blogged every two hours or so. I kept taking screenshots of the search results to time it exactly and in some cases, I did notice the crawlers updating their indexes within ten minutes (once seven minutes from the time of the post and once in nine minutes from the time of posting.)
From this experiment, here are our recommendations for any one who is sincerely interested in taking up blogging seriously:
I Blogging Recommendations
1. Focus: Identify and stick to a topic of your interest. Focus all your blog posts to be around this topic of interest that you picked.
2. Frequency: Stick to a specific frequency between blogs. In other words post regularly with approximately steady intervals between each blog. Eg. Every week, Every day, every two hours, etc. Plan and stick to a time frame that suits you the most, so that the readers are also able to set their expectations on when to expect your next blog post.
Note: We used WordPress with SEO pack installed and perma links enabled. This combination has given the maximum visibility into any blog for SEO.
Hope this helps. Please feel free to let us know if you need any help with any of these ideas given above.