A Blog can be a very useful tool when it comes to marketing your site, as it gives visitors a reason to keep coming back, can make your company seem more approachable and keeps your site updated.

While having a blog can help with SEO, just having one on your site purely for that reasons is a bad idea, as it does need to be updated regularly for you to get any benefits from it. Also having a hardly used blog on your site could give a potential customer the impression that your site is no longer being used, especially if your last blog was a year before they visited. So make sure that you do have the time to update a blog regularly with relevant content before you place one on your site.

If a blog is something that you are interested in here are some reasons why blogs can help your site and its SEO:

RSS
Rss feeds are heavily crawled by search engines, it can also be added to your visitors RSS readers meaning that when ever you update your blog they will be notified and could return to read it.

Structured content
Blogs have a natural structure to them which will help search engines make sense of the content. By having categories and placing relevant content within these categories it helps give your site structure and makes it easier to establish important keywords to your site.

Updated content
Search engines like new content and it encourages them keep coming back to crawl you site to see what’s new.

Could lead to one way links back to your site
By writing interesting articles not only would you be giving people a reason to visit your site but it could also lead to other promoting your site because they want to share what you have written with others and post links to it on their sites. The reason why this is useful is because often search engines give more value to one way links then reciprocal ones.

Promotion, promotion, promotion
Blogs are a great way to promote events, competitions, open days and keep visitors to your site informed of all the latest news about your company. With the RSS feeds this means that those following your blog will automatically be updated with your latest promotion, as does anyone visiting your site or anyone who visits one of the many sites that show latest blog posts with certain keywords in them.

Newsletters/e-newsletters
Just because you have a blog doesn’t mean you should stop any printed or e-newsletters that you send out. A printed newsletter could easily take information from the blog posts as not everyone who reads the newsletter will read the blog, it would also be a good promotion tool for your site and encourage people to visit to get more information. An e-newsletter again could simply take articles from the blog and link back to your original post to drive traffic to the site as it serves and as a reminder to visit your site.

Getting people involved
A blog also gives your visitors a chance to get involved and share their opinions on what you have written. While this is great for customer relations, it also can keep your website fresh with new content when you aren’t updating it yourself if others get involved in a discussion you posted. As comments are managed by you, anything questionable can quickly be removed if it hasn’t already been caught by the automatic spam catchers.

If you would like some more information or a quote to implement a blog onto your website then please contact us by email or by telephone on 0191 487 1834.