The Advantages of blogging on commercial web sites
I’ve decided to add a WordPress blog to the Arena DM website. This is it and you are now reading the inaugural post. I spend a fair bit of my time preaching to my clients about the SEO benefits of blogging on their sites but until now I haven’t been setting much of an example.
I’ve opted to make my first post a brief explanation of why the process of pouring your heart out on your blog helps to keep your website healthy. I’ll try to keep this simple and use loose references and lay terms so that people should be able to easily follow me in an attempt to stop any readers (puft, unlikely) nodding off.
If I were to make a list of all the added benefits that a professionally styled WordPress blog on your website would offer, I would start off my list with just four simple words emblazened at the top of the page and then I’d underline them so anyone reading the list could hardly fail to have the importance of these words impressed upon them.
Spending serious sums of money on professional SEO (or search engine optimisation) can do much to one improve the standings on ones websites with the likes of Messrs Google, but a blog is a really cost effective way of making huge improvements to your search rankings by investing little more than your time.
If you blog about your work, about the same subjects and topics that are covered by your website, over time your blog will grow into a huge collection of directly relevant documents stuffed full of industry specific terms and importantly, keywords.
Assigning relevant TAGs, an feature inherent in WordPress will add further weight to your work. The aim of course is that the search engines begin to recognise your site as an authority in your market sector. The more that you blog and the more frequently that you blog, the more it will help you to stand out from the crowd.
Blogging can quickly yield quantifiable results that will start to show up in yours site’s analytics data.
I have one client, Ann Summers by Sara that took up the opportunity to do exactly this. By blogging on her site Sara created a whole raft of unique documents that could be found nowhere else on the web. Content which was crammed with various terms from the world of Ann Summers parties. Now nearly a year on from when she first started nearly 20% of all organic visitors referred by Google first land on one of the blog pages and from there over 75% find there way into the main site where they are able to make bookings or mail order purchases.
Now think about that for a moment. For the sake of spending 10 – 15 minutes a time 3-4 times a week she has increased the organic traffic to her site by nearly a quarter These people are landing on pages and posts from her blog because they have searched for a term or keyphrase that naturally appears in the blog texts. These are visitors that, if it were not for the presence of her blog may have missed the Ann Summers by Sara site all together and would have probably ended up in the welcoming arms of her competitors.
NB. (In fact, the numbers can be said to be much higher than this, If you take into account the overall levels of traffic that she was receiving at the time when I first began working on her site, I could argue that Sara’s blog has directly increased organic search traffic by new vistors to her site by over 60%. Regardless of how we chose to measure the increases the point should not be lost blogging has become a rich source of new business for Ann Summers by Sara and as part of a wider series of measures designed to optimise the return from her online investment blogging has proven it’s worth many times over.)
In my next post we’ll examine good techniques and practices and look at ways that we can get maximum SEO benefit from our blog posts.
Until then, take care one and all.
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