One question I am asked repeatedly is ‘Why should I have a blog if I already have a website?’
What scares me is that some of the people asking me this question have been told that you only need a website! And this in the age of Google Caffiene!! Really people!
So let’s get a few things clear. A blog IS a website. In fact, blogs or ‘weblogs’ as they are really named, are “dynamic” websites.
Yes, you can create pages on your blog and yes, it is sometimes difficult to tell a blog from a website with all the great blogging software now available online.
As I’ve said before a blog is a frequently updated form of website that is made up of posts (little articles) and entries that are arranged in reverse chronological order so a reader can see the most updated post first.
The advantages of a blog are multiple:
A blogs allows you to post written text, audio and video and have it online within minutes. A traditional static website can take a while to update and, unless you have a good CMS it can also cost you quite a bit for the update.
One of the best parts of blogging is that the site will be up and running in a couple of hours at the most and when you’ve written your first post and published it, you’re ready to do business and the search engines will come and find out what you’re about.
Search engines love blogs, especially since Google launched Caffiene. Each time you publish on a blog the update is ‘pinged’ i.e. search engines are notified of new content on your site and they will come and look at it to index it. Because of this ‘pinged’ information, search engines tend to index blogs far more that a static website.
Did you know that blogs show up ten times more often in an organic search than a static website does? Makes you think!
The other thing that websites don’t do for you is maximise your SEO. Most web designers are just that – designers not IT guys. Sure your static site will look tasty but then you can use that design on a dynamic content blog and up the ante on the search engines by pointing traffic from your blog to your site.
Last and most pertinent of all is that a well written blog site that is linked to social media tools and maintained correctly is far more powerful in gaining rankings and back links for your website. Imagine that each blog you host for your niche gives you backlinks and can drive traffic to your website. Imagine that you maximise each post on those blogs and inserts links to other articles you’ve written to increase ‘stickiness’ on your blog and website. Imagine that each post you’ve optimised in this manner is re-published on article websites like www.ezinearticles.com and then tell me that it’s not worth having a website and a blog.
In my opinion each static website should have links from as many dynamic blogs as a business owner can manage!
I think it’s very important to have both a blog and a website. Websites tend to be like online brochures, very static and limited in the amount of information they contain. Whereas a blog is much more fluid in its content, and has the ability to describe your business in as much detail as you would like, in whatever method is approrpriate (words, video, audio or whatever), not to mention that they are extremely compatible with the search engines who are positively waiting for new material to be published as blog posts, and the spiders are programmed to visit blogs hourly, unlike websites which may have to wait months before they are graced with a visit. This means that posts are much more likely to be found in the top pages of Google than the equivalent websites.