Web Design
Why every business should have a blog
Maintaining a blog can significantly impact your website's exposure, and specifically speaking, your search engine rankings. By now, we hope most of you know how real of an advantage it is to be highly ranked with search engines for the most popular keywords in your industry. If you don't, we encourage a fast track education on the topic and we're here to help.
Blogging (writing and submitting articles) not only increases the keyword-rich content available for search engines to index, but blogs get preferential treatment in the rankings. As you can probably imagine, the algorithms search engines use to rank sites are extremely complex, and yet, there's some common sense to their logic. For instance, search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, infer that people searching for content generally prefer new or fresh content in addition to historical content. In fact, the combination of having archived content, along with regularly submitted content, tells search engines that a particular website/organization is proactive, and likely, a quality provider.
Blogs aren't just fancy tools for producing more content. In fact, the innate features within a blog increase the exposure of your website, and that has even more of a positive impact on search engine rankings than just content. The most important of which is the benefit of link distribution. Let's look at some of the features that enhance link distribution. Features include:
- RSS Feeds – RSS feeds are a type of subscription technology. When users signs up for RSS feeds, they are in simple terms asking the blog to notify them when a new article has been posted. Options for notifying users include email, browser bookmarking, and other types of media aggregators.
- Social Networking Integration – Social networking integration covers a variety of topics. For instance, you can setup a blog such that every time a blog article is submitted, it automatically posts the article title on Facebook and Twitter with a link back to your blog. You can also add a "share this" feature on each article so readers can easily forward articles to friends, colleagues, or a number of other social networking tools.
- Linkback Features – A linkback is essentially a handshake between blogs with an agreement to provide a link back to your blog if you link to another blog, and it's all done automatically. Since search engines consider the amount of links to a site when determining search ranking, linkbacks are a great advantage for sites that maintain a blog. For instance, you can write just a brief post about an article you liked on another blog. You can link to that article, and by linking to it, you establish a link back to your site. Imagine how quickly you can improve the quality and volume of links to your site by implementing this strategy.
- Surveys – Surveys can be a valuable tool for getting feedback from your audience, and blogs have survey plug-ins that can be very effective. Blog subscribers love to see surveys that are tied to a blog post, and you'd be amazed how often they'll answer a couple of questions just to see the results.
- Comments – Allowing users to comment on articles isn't something we recommend for every organization, but it can be an effective way to communicate with your readers. Readers usually provide good insight, and when new readers see current users making comments, it encourages them to sign-up and come back more often. Over time, it has been proven that user-contributed content will grow a subscription base. If you're worried about users making disparaging or unprofessional comments on your blog, you can always setup the blog such that you approve or delete comments before they go live.
- Video Sections – Video is fast becoming the rich media of choice on the web as the stickiness of video supersedes all other web content. Because of that, blog plug-in features can provide a great place to publish and archive video content that will keep readers coming back for more.
While the aforementioned features may seem complex or new to some, they are fairly straightforward concepts and most importantly, are generally automated after initial setup and/or designed for non-technical administrators to manage moving forward. With all the search engine marketing, social networking, and publicity benefits that a blog can provide, one of the greatest things about a blog is that it is extremely easy to use. Blogs are run by backend software designed for non-technical users to easily write, edit, categorize, and submit articles and other types of content. Like all good marketing strategies though, blogs require a fair amount of work. It isn't a “set it and forget it” solution.
At CyberSense we can provide anything from a fully-managed blog to a self-run solution. Any way you want to do it, our blogging systems are easy to use, understand and include the newest social networking tools. CyberSense provides blog design and blog management services as well as ways to enhance your blogs, such as social media marketing, online customer surveys and video editing. Contact us to get an idea on how we can assist in your organization's need.
