Blogs are a great technique to keep sites fresh and regularly updated with content. There are many free blog creation services available like Blogger and Bloglines. While it is advisable you host it on your own server, many of these services allow you to host it on their servers. Other great free options are WordPress and TypePad
Here’s a great tool for those SEO wannabes running blogs on their sites.
FeedShot is a free tool for blog search engine submissions. A paid alternative to this is RSS Submit which has been around for a while. The initial submission is a feed, rather than a pinging service like Pingomatic. It also reports which submissions were successful, which failed, and which were duplicates.