It's well established (although often forgotten) that when promoting a website you shouldn't restrict yourself to online methods. Getting the site's title and URL known by offline methods such as posters, newspaper classifieds and flyer drops can be very effective. After all, pretty much everyone is online now -- and many of them for much of the day. So they can just type the URL directly into their browsers.

Obviously the more people who view your site the better. And there's an indirect benefit in that it will significantly increase the likelihood that bloggers will link to it voluntarily. This offline linkbait can be very powerful.

Take the case of the nomadic Aussie comedian Jimbo. He has a very unusual companion: a goat called Gary. This friendly herbivore, who sports a colourful cap, always turns heads wherever he goes. He also gets into a bit of strife occasionally.

One time he ate some flowers outside Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. This faux pas put his owner Jimbo into a spot of legal bother, although the case was eventually thrown out of court.

In any case Gary and his owner became very widely known as a result of this and other escapades. So now all Jimbo has to do to get social media buzzing, and some mainstream media attention, is to take Gary for a walk through the CBD. All that social activity is a boon to Jimbo's site in several ways of course. And the odd dofollow link results from online news reports such as this one.

This phenomenon is well worth noting if you are a webmaster or blogger. If you can manage to do something consistently eye-catching and perhaps a bit eccentric while remaining true to yourself, there's a good chance you can use it to benefit the URL's standing on social media and the search engines.

I have written before about how blogging seems to lift the search engine rankings of the main domain. This is partially due to the fact that Google likes updated content. After all, if your competition for certain keywords hasn't changed his site for a year, and you've been writing posts regularly on a blog that's part of your main domain, then clearly your domain is more "alive" than his. It's just a small effect but it could easily be enough to lift you above him in the SERPs.

Frequency aside, there's also the subject matter of your blog posts. If a page on your site targets certain keywords, and you have lots of blog posts about them as well, it seems logical that Google will look more favourably on that inner page. After all, you've shown the search engine that you have lots of expertise in this area. (Of course you can't say this for certain, and there is some disagreement about this in SEO circles, like there is on so many subjects related to the discipline.)

That said, I'm pretty confident that this effect does apply. Here's a case in point:

Recently, I built a site to help small and home businesses in Perth. Just one of several pages listed flyer distribution services. I did some link building to the main domain, and to one inner page on the site. And there was an internal link between the flyer distribution page and the home page that I had right from the start. But other than that I did nothing.

Anyway, after a couple of months that particular page was at the bottom of Google's second page for "Perth flyer distribution". It stayed there for a while.

In the last several weeks I wrote a couple of blog posts about flyer distribution, listing them under the blog category "flyers". Since they have been indexed the separate page listing the service has crept up onto the bottom half of page one. I have had a few calls as a result.

Now, maybe it would have ended up there anyway. But in the whole time this rise happened I've done no link building to that page from other sites. And I've done none to the main domain either aside from creating Twitter and Facebook page accounts (but they were very recent , and I can't find them in Google yet). So, it seems very likely that this recent rise has resulted in major part from those blog posts being indexed.

So, the obvious takeway lesson is to keep writing in your blog about keywords you're targeting in your main pages. You'll get some long tail keyword search traffic to those posts anyway. And they seem to give the other pages a bit of an SEO boost as well.