Blogging for Business

What are Blogs? Blogs, short for web logs, are basically online journals. Many of them are personal journals that people keep online. But many website owners have blogs as an adjunct to their sites, or their websites are built  directly on blogs, such as ours here at Online Business Junction.

Blogs can be a great marketing tool for the online business owner, and they’re an ideal way to keep your customers  or clients informed about what’s happening with your business. But if you do start a blog, be sure to maintain it and do regular updates at least a couple of times per week. An effective blog is an active one, so you want to keep the content on it fresh, for your customers as well as for the search engines.

So what should you write about on a business blog? Here are some ideas that might be helpful.

  • New products added to your store
  • Current Sales or Specials
  • Feedback from Customers
  • Special Events
  • Links and helpful resources
  • Photos of your brick and mortar store (if you have one), website products, or home (but optimize them for the web to ensure faster loading,and keep the number of photos to a minimum)
  • Daily life and chatter
  • Anything else

Blogs also have great SEO benefits as well. According to Country Business magazine in their January, 2008 issue, blogs help your site “show up higher in search engine results. Search engines take into how account how recently a site has been updated and how frequently new content is added.” Since blogs tend to get updated far more frequently than the typical website, you can see how this can be a benefit for your blogs and its SE rankings.

There are blog hosting sites out there that will allow you to build your own blog for free on their servers; and there are some that you have to host on your own. If you’re interested in creating a blog, check out WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and LiveJournal

Once you’ve created your blog, then you need to start promoting it and link-building, just as you would with any other website. Increasing the number of inbound links (backlinks pointing to your site) is probably the number one way to get your blog to show up higher in search engine rankings…which is also true for websites. Viewed simply, every link to your site is like a vote for your site with the search engines. Link exchanges are the easiest and most affordable (usually free!) way to generate inbound links. So that should be the starting point for everyone who wants to improve their blog’s SE rankings. But there’s a catch: the inbound links should be from higher ranked sites than your own; they should be from sites whose content is relevant to your own; and they should link to you using relevant keywords (the same principles that apply for any website).

You can also list your blog in any number of the many blog directories out there on the Web. Technorati and BlogCatalog are good places to start. Note that many of the directories require an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed–so if you don’t know what that is, it’s a good idea to Google yourself some info on it before you submit to those.

There are also lots of ways to optimize your blog for search engines, just as you need to do for regular websites. So check Google for info on optimizing your blog for search engines as well. You’ll find lots of info about keywords, meta tags, regularly updated content, optimal length of posts, avoiding duplicate content (always a strike against a website or blog when content is duplicated from somewhere else), site design, and a lot more.

Also pay attention to the number of outbound links you should have. If you’re really concerned with your blog’s search engine rankings, then you should limit the number of outbound links you have, and the ones you do have should be relevant to your own blog’s content as well. If your SE standings don’t matter to you, then your number of outbound links don’t matter at all. But if they do, definitely keep those outbound links to a minimum.

One other thing you’ll find if you do a lot of research into improving your blog’s rankings, is that pretty much everyone will recommend that you do NOT use default templates provided by free blogging sites. They really recommend that you customize your template as much as you can, or that you buy a domain for your blog and host it yourself instead of using free blog services. WordPress and Blogger will each let you purchase a domain through them and then host the site for free, which is great. This will let you have a unique domain name for your blog.