The Most Important Part Of Your Company Blog

What is the most important part of your blog? The short answer is, it depends on the type of blog it is. The long answer is, it depends on the type of blog it is.

Your Company Blog’s Purpose

The first thing you need to do, before you start your company blog, is to define its purpose. Without a clearly defined purpose your blog will likely go nowhere. There are as many purposes for company blogs as there are companies and it is imperative that you take this essential step of defining what you want your blog to do.

Blogging As Linkbuilding

You really want people who read your company blog to visit your website. To get them there you need links. Lots of links. You want at least one link in every post and I always recommend several links to your website in your blogroll, or sidebar. You want to send targeted traffic to every page of your website. Therefore, make sidebar links using important keywords related to pages on your website where you want to send traffic. You’ll drive targeted traffic to those pages and, because the search engines consider each blog post a separate web page, you’ll be building quality links into every blog post.

Blogging as SEO

You SEO your website, right? Why not SEO your blog?

I’m not talking about spam. I’m talking about using viable and verifiable strategies for SEOing your website. That is, using keywords, lists, h2 and h3 tags, alt tags with your images, and other SEO techniques are tried and proven. You use them on your website, why not use them on your blog?

The Most Important Part of Your Company Blog

While your blog’s purpose, link building, and SEO are all important parts of your company blog, the most important part of your blog is the marketing. You want people to read it, right?

While organic SEO will get you targeted traffic, you don’t just want to rely on that. You also want to do other things to get targeted traffic to your blog so that you can reach the kind of people you want to reach. Here are the top 3 ways of marketing your blog and I recommend them all:

• List your blog in blog directories
• Social bookmarking
• Trackback to other blogs in your niche

Blog directories have been a good source of links for a long time. People go to blog directories to find the type of blogs they want to read and if you are listed in the most popular blog directories then you’ll get targeted traffic.

Social bookmarking is also essential. By setting up accounts at each of the top social bookmarking sites and spending an hour each day bookmarking other blogs and stories that you like you can build a network of friends and acquaintances who will bookmark you in return. Social bookmarks are a good source of targeted traffic.

Finally, by reading other blogs in your niche and trackbacking to them, you build a solid source of targeted traffic. The rule is, hang out where your readers hang out. Get them over to your blog by posting intelligent and useful comments on other blogs and leading them back to yours.

Allen Taylor
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