by Jackie Baker
Blogging for business is huge these days. When done well, it’s a great tactic for engaging your visitors, facilitating conversation with your audience, attracting links, and getting more pages to rank in the search engines for relevant terms. But there are some key functioanlity areas you need to address when incorporating a blog with your main website.
As you optimize individual blog posts for your targeted keywords, you have the potential to have more pages rank in the search engines for those terms. Just think, if you optimized well and got lots of links, you could have website pages and blog posts fill up the top results when people search for “martial arts austin.”
Additionally the title of each blog post needs to be clickable. Instead of just reading all of the posts on one page, link the title to the individual post. That way, a reader can click to read just that post and all of its comments. Speaking of blog comments …
Comments Section
The Premier Martial Arts blog has a link for comments, but it isn’t used in the traditional blog sense. Instead of allowing readers to leave a comment under a specific post, they are taken to the main contact form on the website. This is not blog commenting!
Blog comments are a means to facilitate a conversation between readers and the blog author. They are also a way for people to get links back to their own blog. Each post should have its own comments section. Visitors can click on either the title of the post or a “comments” link under the post, where they are taken to the individual post page with all of the comments listed at the bottom and a form for submitting their own. This form should have fields for visitors to enter their name, email address, URL, and comment.
For an example of how a comments section should work, check out the one at the bottom of this article, and on every other article on Search Engine Guide.
Subscriptions
You have two primary call to actions on a blog:
- leaving a comment
- subscribing to a feed
Every blog needs to have an RSS feed (really simple syndication). An RSS feed allows regular readers to subscribe to your updates in a feed reader.
Feeds are great because they allow people to easily track your blog updates, which in turn keeps them more engaged and involved.
Make It Easy To Share
Social media is huge these days. And you want it to be very easy for your readers to share your content with other through primary and niche social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, and many others.
Blogging platforms offer plugins you can use to add buttons to your blog that readers can click to submit or vote for your article if they like. Make it easy for readers to share the stuff that they like!
Speaking of blogging platforms …
Many of these platforms also come with a large variety of templates you can use, and then customize. Or, you can find a programmer to create a template that matches your main website design.
If you are going to run a successful business blog, you really need to do it with software that will make it efficient and easy. And the best part is, most of these are free!
Blogging is a great online marketing strategy because it keeps your content fresh, engages your audience, and attracts links. So make sure that it is working as well as it possibly can!
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Excerpt from:
Site Clinic: Incorporating A Blog On Your Company Website
Tags: analytics, brand-building, comes-to-the, guide, industry, jackie-baker, keywords, logic-marketing, marketing, newsletters, search, search-engine, search-engine-guide, seo, small-business, social-media, stumbleupon, viral-marketing
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