Why You Should be Blogging!

For a business to get a search and conversion marketing strategy on the right track, a wonderful and essential step is to include a blog on the site. Whether you’re selling products, disseminating information, attracting email addresses for your mailing lists, getting leads, or anything else, blogs are a great way to get attention from the search engines and attract links to the site. Besides the website optimization benefits, blogs also provide a forum to communicate the company’s products and services. A blog provides a place for clients and/or people with similar interests of the company to dialog, and this dialog helps you grow and maintain a reputable site. Essentially, a blog can be an excellent tool to provide value to your visitors, show valuable content to the search engines, and promote your site for the keywords that are important to you.

To get started, there are really only two things you need to do. First, you’ll need to set up the blog, and set it up correctly. Second, you’ll need to start blogging!

Step 1: Set up Your Blog

Many organizations can get intimidated about setting up a blog on their site, and with good reason. Although getting a blog up and running on your site is fairly straightforward, you must spend some time choosing the right solution and installing and configuring the blog in a way that makes it most attractive to search engine spiders. Once the technical parts of the install are complete, you’ll need to develop a list of topics to cover in the blog.The topics can simply come from the company’s key products and services.Brainstorm within the company about what topics clients will be interested in.What are the common questions being asked about the company’s products and services?Why is the business better than other businesses in the same industry?

And always be thinking of how you can relate these topics to your core keyword target list. As the blog matures, topics will manifest themselves based on the feedback received. That feedback may even dictate new products or services. Logistically, you should make sure to link to your blog from your homepage, and you should make sure it’s set up on the same domain. A good tip is to use an RSS feed from your blog to show content from your blog on other parts of your site. Although there are a number of options out there for your blog solution, we like WordPress for its search friendly configuration and add-on options.

Step 2: Start Blogging

Typically the hardest part about a blog is doing the writing itself and continuing it in a consistent manner. In order to have a successful blog, you absolutely need to be blogging! A company needs to recognize that the blog is important not only for the value it provides to its visitors, but also for providing search engines with keyword rich content that further describes your site. As your audience is two-fold, keep in mind that blog writing needs to be done in a way that supports both of these objectives. There are a number of ways to make sure that your blog gets written to consistently.

• It’s good to spread the responsibility of throughout the company. Have everyone in the company write a blog post once a day, once a week, or with whatever frequency they can support.
• Look to your local educational institutions for interns. Internships in technical writing can be an excellent way to ensure that your blog is kept up to date with fresh content.
• Have it done professionally. Outsourcing to companies that specialize in content generation can keep you on track with precisely calculated, keyword rich, search engine friendly blog posts, and you can have loads of content posted for you without taking a single minute out of your day.

Blogging is an absolutely essential part of your search marketing strategy, and the best time to get started was yesterday!

Find out how WebShare can help you set up, configure, and start populating your blog with valuable content. Contact us when you’re ready to take your search marketing strategy to the next level.