Author Archive for Allen
The Primary Reason Your Business Needs A Blog
You’ve likely heard all the reasons your business needs a blog:
- Branding
- SEO
- Customer Service
- Being Sociable With Your Audience
- Creating Dialogue
- “Connecting” With People
- Facilitating Social Media Marketing
- Insert Reason Here
But the primary reason you need a blog is hardly ever mentioned. The best reason to start a blog today is because your competition has one.
Now I’m not suggesting that you start keeping up with the Jones’. Nor am I saying that you should be a be a follower. But the reason you should have a blog if your competition does is so that you remain competitive.
You see, a blog is one of the most dynamic SEO tools available. Any business with a blog has a distinct advantage over the competition in a number of ways. Here’s how a blog benefits any business that has one:
- Increases search engine saturation – the number of pages you have ranked in the search engines
- Boosts your link popularity – the number of inbound links to your website
- Gives you more content on your website, making your site more crawlable and more often crawled by the search engines
I could go on and on about the benefits of blogging, but what it all boils down to is a blog on your competition’s website gives them an edge in the search engines. If you don’t have one then you are at a disadvantage. If you have a blog and your competition doesn’t then you have the advantage. If you and your competition both have blogs then there is a more level playing field, except that the one who can better manage their blog could have a better advantage.
In business, it’s all about competition. A blog can give you an edge where before you didn’t have one. And that’s why you need a blog today.
Should You Use Free Article Content For Blogs?
Should you use free article content from article directories for your blog?
Before I answer, let me say that I have. I’ve gone to an article directory and used an article for my blog, but I don’t do it every day. And I’d suggest that you not do it every day either.
However, using free article content for your blog is not necessarily a bad idea. You can do it if you think the article will benefit your audience and it adds value to your blog. Don’t do it just because you want content on your blog.
Free articles are there for a reason. The article directories are there for a reason. But don’t just snag an article as filler content. That’s a sure way to ruin your reputation. Instead, only use an article if your audience can’t live without it. The article will not help you with SEO so don’t look for those kinds of benefits. It will help establish you as a person with good judgment if you do it correctly and choose articles that your audience appreciates. If you fail to do that then your audience will abandon you.
A Blog Is The Best Link Building Tool You Have
I love it when people verify what I’ve been saying for years. Michael Martinez back in February had a great post that discussed the three best link building tools. One of those is blogging.
Here’s what he says about the benefits of blogging:
Pros of Blogs
–They are usually easy to set up and low-maintenance
–They are more powerful and flexible than widgets, gadgets, gizmos, and plug-ins
–They allow you to populate multiple domains/subdomains quickly
And I’ll add this to the pro list on blogs as well – They achieve better search engine results more quickly than any other tool available. Yes, even better than articles. Better than static websites. Better than social media. More powerful than a speeding bullet. Etc.
Why are blogs so good for search engine optimization, including link building? Because they are crawled – like all updated content – every single time you update them. The more often you update your blog, the more it will get crawled. The more it gets crawled, the more opportunities you have of achieving great rankings. Each and every blog post you write is treated like a separate web page by the search engines. Therefore, every ranking factor that applies to any web page applies to every single blog post you write. If you have a blog with 500 blog posts then that’s 500 chances to rank for your keyword, 500 chances + for your links to build link juice and gain the age advantage, 500 chances to build anchor text links with high quality and relevance, etc. Blogging is guerrilla SEO on steroids!
I could write all day about the search engine benefits of blogging. But, do it wrong, and you can kill your rankings. That’s why it is important to choose an expert in blogging, ghostwriting, and SEO who can steer you in the right direction and keep you away from dangerous waters.
Want to know more? Get a free consult with a blog consultant.
Can An Off-Site Blog Build Inbound Links To Your Main Website?
One strategy that some SEOs and Internet marketers have used to build inbound links into their main website is to set up an off-site blog and link profusely to their main website. The question is, does this work? There are two parts to this discussion:
- First, yes, it can work to a limited degree.
- But only if approached in the right way.
The Real Purpose For Your Blog
Before you start talking about the link building aspect of your blog, you need to first understand the primary purpose for your blog, namely, to communicate with your customers and potential customers. Your blog is a marketing tool. You want it to draw in potential customers and drive them to your imporant web pages. The most effective blogs are the ones that do this using high quality, relevant content on a consistent basis.
There are three primary approaches to marketing with a blog and each of them should work in tendem to support the others. These are branding, pre-sales, and information publishing.
Let’s discuss these in backward order. Information publishing is all about delivering quality and helpful information to your readers. That doesn’t mean every blog post has to be a dynamic 1,000-word tome. Size doesn’t matter. Quality does.
Pre-sales information is not about closing. You can effectively use a blog as a sales closing tool, but it doesn’t have to be use that way. The way Blog Content Provider approaches blogging is to use each blog post as a pre-sales tool. We set up the sale by delivering useful, relevant information to your readers that interests them in more information and entices them toward your sales pages.
Branding is a term that simply means you develop a recognizable name for yourself in the marketplace. By using a blog as a branding tool you communicate an important message to your potential customers that you are professional and serous about doing business.
How To Build Inbound Links With Your Blog
Your off-site blog can be an important way to attract new business into your sales funnel. Each blog post has the potential to achieve high search engine rankings on its own with the proper search engine marketing techniques. But that alone will not be enough to drive massive traffic to your website.
Inbound links to your main website can increase your search engine positioning relative to your competition. Your off-site blog can play a part in that by adding links to your website from the body of each post as well as in your sidebar. Honestly, though, the links in each blog post – the in-text links – will be more valuable in this regard and can drive traffic to your main website as well as build links.
Another way to build links is through a signature at the bottom of each blog post.
The danger in using this method to build links is that it could be construed as a form of spam if not done properly. Mixing some outbound links into your blog posts to highly relevant, authoritative websites within your niche can assist you with your link building efforts as the search engines see this as a sign that you are using natural linking techniques. But you want to be sure of two things with regard to your outbound links:
- You aren’t link to your competitors
- And you are avoiding bad neighborhoods
The Limitations Of Blogging As A Linkbuilding Tool
Every search engine marketing technique has its limitations. Including blogging. While you can build relevant and authoritative links using an off-site blog, there are some concerns you should take into consideration before you start blogging.
No. 1, don’t put your blog on the same IP block as your website. Host it with a completely different hosting company. The search engines have been known to discount links from sites owned by the same owner just for being on the same IP block and in the same niche.
Secondly, don’t rely entirely on your blog for inbound links. This is one of the biggest mistakes that website owners make. Link diversity is very important. If all of your links are coming from the same source then you will likely cap out on your rankings, and there is a high degree of probability that it won’t be on page 1. You should also build links from other sources. This link diversity along with variation in your anchor text will bring you more search engine favor than your blog alone.
For more information about blogging, click here to speak to a blog consultant.
