What is So Great About Blogs?
(Source)
* Blogs are a great medium for your customers and prospects to get to know you and your services better.
* When you post information to a blog the blog software automates the process of updating your website with the new information and archiving old content; simplifying the chore of keeping your website fresh and relevant.
* Blogs can automatically announce (ping) to the world whenever new content is added. Again, this automated process simplifies the all-important (and normally time consuming) promotion process.
* Through the use of syndication methods your blog postings (writings) can be monitored easily by fans of your services/writing.
* Blogs provide a wonderful platform for readers to interact with you by leaving comments.
* Due to the highly social and interactive nature of blogs it is possible that links will begin to appear to your posts from other websites. This can increase your website’s link popularity and will only happen if you write engaging and source-worthy content.

All of that is fine, but most purveyors of blog marketing fail to mention the real benefits of blogging. Yes, you want people to read your blog, and you hope they’ll comment on a few posts, give you their feedback. Certainly it would be nice to reward you with a backlink and drive more traffic to your blog, etc. etc. But what about the SEO benefits of the blog itself?

What I mean, you don’t have to wait for someone else to link to your blog to enjoy the benefits of link popularity. You can build your own link popularity through your blog. Here are a few more benefits of blogs that you might want to think about:

• A blog builds search engine saturation by the creation of new content on your website every single day
• You build link popularity by linking to your website in every blog post - the most effective bloggers do this 2 or 3 times in each post
• Your blog can be used as a store window, to showcase a different product or service each day in order to draw people into your website for more information
• Keyword-optimization of each blog post gives your website another doorway or entrance from the World Wide Web with each post

What Blog Software is Available?

Blogger by Google (Free): Unfortunately, Blogger is far from perfect and lacks much of the customization potential available in other solutions. We plan on changing to a new system in the future even though it will not be a simple task to change.

There are two types of Blogger; one is the hosted solution (using Google’s servers) called Blog*Spot and the other is a personally hosted solution where updates and archives are automatically posted within your own website. The Blog*Spot solution is not recommended because, like TypePad (#4 below), all of the content and links will not be as influential because they are not hosted on your own website. There will be some benefit because your blog is likely to link to your main website profusely; however, it is best to integrate the Blogger blog within your own website.

I’d never recommend Blogger. For one thing, Microsoft recently performed a study (opens a .pd file) that confirmed 75% of all Blogger blogs are spammers. Do you want to be associated with spammers?

Another reason you don’t want to use Blogger.com, or any free blog host, is because you don’t have any control over the domain. What if the site disappears or is shut down? What if someone reports you for spam? Blogger, makes it easy for anyone to report your site for spam since they have a “flag blog” for spam icon at a highly visible location on your blog. This encourages false accusations and your competition could use it against you. What happens if Google temporary closes your account to investigate the accusations or somehow rules against you and shuts you down?

Do yourself a favor: Don’t let yourself be into a compromising position. Own the domain. Own the blog.

WordPress (Free): WordPress is a very impressive blogging solution that can be easily installed and offers myriad advanced options including simple-to-install plug-ins to extend the capabilities of the program. I have personally installed and used WordPress for a while now on personal websites and I highly recommend it.

One concern about using WordPress is integrating your current website design with it as its templates are solely CSS driven. If your website is not CSS-driven you will be in for a bit of unexpected work. Converting your web design to CSS is definitely a smart move but at that point you are effectively redesigning your website; which makes the addition of a blog much more work than it needs to be.

I use WordPress. I recommend it. The plug-ins are awesome and there isn’t much bad to say about this software program. Use it once and you’ll see what I mean. It can be a headache to install and configure, however. Use their instructions. The caution about redesigning your website and making it CSS-driven is worth considering, but if you haven’t redesigned your website around CSS already then you are way behind. CSS is where it’s at today. If you’re still using tables then you’re behind the times.

There are other software programs you can consider but WordPress is the one I’d recommend. MovableType is popular, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. There is a free version and a commercial version, which you have to pay for. You’re just as well off with WordPress’s free download. Typepad is another free host, like Blogger. Similar problems.

You can learn more about how to use a blog for search engine optimization and for marketing your business from the guys at Blogs.pn. They really know what they’re doing.

ASM Development can help you with all your SEO & Web Design needs
SEO Blog

Recent Entries

• Build A Temple And The Masses Will Flock
• Blogging The Google Way
• Online Advertising Suffering From Overkill
• Keyword Research And Plurals And Pseudo Plurals
• What Is Best - One Long Article Or Several Smaller Articles?
• Keywords - Organic Versus Paid
• What’s Wrong With Blatant Self Promotion In Your Blog Content?
• Are Link Exchanges Black Hat?
• Bounce Rate Rears Its Ugly Head SEO Head - Again
• Link Building - Is Article Marketing Dead?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.