Do consider adding a blog to a website. This is a big decision because a Blog without regular posts is perfectly useless. It is the regular Blog posts that add quite a bit to the overall work of keeping website content Fresh. Please do seriously consider this when adding a Blog to your website.
A regularly updated blog, with good to great content, gives site visitors:
- Multiple reasons to revisit the website often
- Encourages them to subscribe to the website’s Newsletter
This would normally carry a synopsis of Blog posts and other webpage content.
There are also Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) benefits that Blog posts brings to any website.
More Content For Search Engines To Read Through And Index
Most websites have a fairly limited number of pages. Home, About Us, Contact Us, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, and perhaps most importantly the – Products ( or Services ) squeeze page.
More than likely most of these – Standard – pages will contain a limited number of words per page and will be almost identical to thousands of similar pages on other websites.
The addition of a Blog ensures that there is the possibility of regularly creating, fresh, rich content for the website. This content will include keywords the website is trying to rank well for in Search Engine, Result Pages ( SERPs ). Blog content gives search engines regular, fresh, website content to crawl through and index, content that will hopefully contain specific keywords that the website wants to rank well for..
Every Blog post written offers the opportunity to add 5 to 10 new keywords. Some of these keywords are actually long tailed key phrases containing the keywords the website is trying to rank well for in SERPs. Long tail keywords – can be a lot easier for any website to rank well for.
As a keyword phrase gets longer, there are often fewer instances of the key phrase in search engine indexes, hence, there is less competition for top rankings in results when site visitors search using those key phrases.
For example, a pet food website could add a blog that offers pet health care advice. Perhaps the company wants to improve the online sales of its pet food. The website could have multiple pages extolling the virtue of pet food over the other.
Blog posts could also be written by pet owners who have been delighted with the pet food purchased via the website. Each such pet owner could write a Blog post on their personal experience(s) when they used the pet food purchased from the website.
Every one of those Blog posts will definitely contain phrases around the term – pet food – which is a keyword phrase. By adding lots of Blog posts that include this phrase, the website would be signaling search engines that it has plenty of information about – pet food. The website’s pages would then definitely show up higher in the SERPs that include the words – pet food.
The more pages of the website in top slots of SERPs, the more focused / potential website visitors will be driven to the website.
Updated Content for Search Engines – and People
Search engines get unhappy when a website’s content gets stale, i.e. unchanged and static. Having a blog encourages the updation of website content often. BTW, having a Blog that has stale, static content really defeats all SEO benefits that the Blog can bring to the website.
When a new Blog post is created a new URL gets added to the website’s XML site map. Sitemaps are what search engines scan regularly ( their structure is very convenient for search engines spiders to scan ) to check for new information.
Each update in your XML site map is a reason for the search engine spider to come back to index the new stuff on your website and possibly adjust your websites rank within its index.
If website content just stays static and is never updated, search engines have no reason to re-crawl the website at all.
Adding topical, useful and interesting Blog posts frequently to the Blog will give people a reason to return often to see what’s new. It also gives them a reason to subscribe to the website’s RSS feed.
If the Blog is updated with information about new products, new services, or new uses for products and service – there will be repeat visitors. This does generate more sales = more money in the bank account.
Link Power
Another key element for SEO – links – not just inbound links to the website, but outbound links from the website to other websites.
When the website links to other ( relevant ) websites, search engines recognize that you are trying to provide site visitors with a great user xperience for anyone who visits your website.
This is because once they reach your website they have the opportunity to navigate to other related websites that contain information that would be useful to them. Such information has been judged as valuable hence a created link has been created to it. Links are how search engines discover new web pages, hence the websites inked to are being done a good turn.
Search engines find links to pages on the website which have valuable information for a site visitor from blog posts interesting. This signals search engines that these are the pages which have information you think your blog readers will find valuable. This may not shoot the website’s pages to the No. 1 spot in SERPs but, linking to pages within the website helps search engines notice connections between page content and blog post content.
Watch out for Duplicate Content
Please be sure that website page content is not duplicated within a Blog post. Worse still is duplicating content from someone else’s website within a Blog post. Search engines really dislike – duplicate content – and will penalize the website ranking in their result pages for sure.
If specific information from another website is going to be particularly useful to your site visitors, and that you feel compelled to republish it, well – this is called information Syndication.
Ensure that you’ve got permission from whoever owns the Intellectual Property Rights ( IPR ) of such information. Clearly attribute such information to its original source with a link back to the original article.
A website that ages displaying syndicated content will usually not rank as well as a website whose pages display original content – but by syndicating content the website is providing a useful site visitor experience which is never ever a bad idea.
Summing up, a Blog is:
- A great way to keep website content fresh
- Boost rankings in SERPs
Give people a reason to visit your site frequently
Remember, there’s no law saying that the Blog has to be updated daily, or even weekly. Start Blog updation once a month, and grow from there as the SERPs results begin to create buzz in the Internet world.
