All Entries Tagged With: "website"
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.
Analytics For Local Blogs
If you write a local blog or your business is a local business with a blog then you can track certain data with Google Analytics over and above the traditional GA offerings. Google has recently announced that its Local Business Center is now providing such data. The specific data you can track through your local blog website include:
- Impressions – The number of times your blog or website appear for a search, either through Google.com or Google Maps
- Actions – The number of times searchers interact with your business listing
- Top Search Queries – What are the top search queries used to find your local blog
- Zip Codes – Which zip codes are used to find your local blog or business
Understand that this information is available for listings in Google’s Local Business Center so if your blog isn’t listed then you won’t get this data for your blog. But how do you get your blog listed?
Actually, it’s your business that is listed. But what if your business was a blog? There are all sorts of ways you can work this into a local business listing angle:
- Start a blog for a local restaurant
- Write a tourist or travel blog for your local area
- Introduce a community blog to your neighborhood and sell advertising
- Add a blog to your business website
- Use a blog to highlight high profile members of your community
These are just a few ideas. But bear in mind that thinking outside the box is allowed. Just because you have a business website doesn’t mean you can’t have a separate website that is a blog. Or your primary website could be a blog. This is a new and growing trend among web businesses; the website owner, instead of building a static site, builds a blog instead and updates it every day. If you took that idea and used it for a local community blog then you’d qualify to be included in the Local Business Center. Of course, your primary static website can get the same data by being listed in the LBC as well.
How Many Sales Does Your Blog Make?
Speaking to some blog owners you’d think that sales was the most important thing. You’ll hear them say things like, “I haven’t made a sale in months” or “I get a lot of traffic, but it’s not converting.” The issue might not be your blog.
Keep in mind that a blog is not necessarily your best sales tool online. Your website is. A blog is often better used to drive traffic to your website. One advantage that a blog has over a static website is the ability to get crawled by search engines and ranked more quickly. That’s because every time you update your blog post you invite the search engines back to your website to crawl it and every blog post is a separate web page. Those are great benefits.
But within every benefit lies a burden. The downside to every blog post being able to rank faster is that they also become irrelevant much faster. Most people don’t read every blog post of every blog they subscribe to. They read the ones with the catchy titles and that cover the topics in which they have an interest.
That said, instead of focusing on hitting home runs with every blog post, instead try to just get on base with each blog post. Sometimes you’ll strike out (Babe Ruth struck out more often than he got hits but look at how many home runs he had). Sometimes you’ll walk or hit a single. Other times you’ll hit a double or triple and, yes, sometimes you’ll hit that coveted home run. The key to blogging, however, is long term permanence. If you effectively use your blog to drive traffic to your website and you aren’t making sales then it may not be your blog’s fault. It could be your website’s.
Why Is Your Blog Hosted By The Same Company As Your Main Website?
You decided to start a blog and buy a separate domain name so you can build links from your blog to your website. Good. Your knowledge of link popularity is beginning to show. But why are you hosting your blog with the same hosting company that also hosts your website? That’s not good.
The reason you want your blog hosted by a different company than your website’s host is to ensure that they sit on separate IP blocks. You can request that your web host put your blog on a different server, but that doesn’t mean they will do it. Some will tell you that they will then not do it. But if you are using the shared hosting plan that many hosts offer, most hosts will tell you that they can’t guarantee a separate box for your blog unless you pay for the dedicated hosting plan. It is just safer and more secure to go with a different host to begin with.
You might also register your site with a different registrar. The reason is because your registrar’s contact information shows up in your Whois data. That could be a clue to Google that both your website and blog are owned by the same company, especially if they have similar domain names (i.e. mywebsite.com and mywebsiteblog.com). Be sure that you register your blog under a different name; that way your name is not associated both with your website and your blog.
These are just precautions. There is no proof that Google uses Whois data to connect ownership of sites. But there is no proof that it doesn’t either. If you want the links from your blog to your website to count, it would behoove you to take these suggestions under consideration.
