Death Records, which is an affiliate marketing website owned by Smoking Dogs, received a makeover last month.

The homepage was modified to incorporate a blog. It still maintains a similar "flavor" as before.

The idea was to use the blog to improve search engine optimization from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Note that we made this change on February 19, 2006. On March 9, we noticed traffic had doubled, and has remained steady since. The increase appears to have come from Google.

Coincidence?

We think this is evidence that a blog (or at least one from Blogger), can make a significant impact towards boosting traffic to non-blog website. I'd like to believe that Google is smarter than that, and that's probably the case. However, there's something about integrating a Blogger blog into a plain-jane website that seems to boost its credibility.