Question:

The other day at a meeting, one of my suppliers asked me if I had a blog on my website. When I responded that I didn’t, he seemed surprised and said that every website should have one and that it would help increase my rankings. I don’t know the first thing about ‘blogging’ but I feel like I should try because this guy said he had been to an Internet Marketing training seminar and that’s what they told him. Can you explain?

Andy, Hertfordshire

Hi Andy.

Well, firstly, if this guy’s Internet Marketing training course told him having a blog would help increase his rankings, they’re not hearing the full story. A blog for the sake of a blog doesn’t have any magical powers to assist in getting you to page one of Google on its own; you need to ensure it is properly optimised and working in conjunction with the rest of your site (more on that later).

What a blog DOES do, first and foremost, (and search engines love this) is provide regular, fresh content to your site which, in turn, means that it will be indexed more regularly. If the spiders see that a site is constantly being updated, they will visit more often. Most blogs’ software also now has a ‘pinging’ function which seems to get them indexed quicker.

Now, on to the optimising of your blog. In our experience (and we’ve got quite a lot when it comes to blogs) if your blog is properly set up and managed, it CAN have a huge impact on your rankings. But there are a number of SEO considerations that need to be addressed; you need to insure the blog has meta tags and that you utilise some good, key phrase rich internal linking to other pages of your site (if it is an onsite blog,) as well as making it interesting and relevant by the use of external links.

If you host the blog offsite (on a different domain) then you will need to spend a lot of time and effort building it up so that it is a credible source in the eyes of search engines. This requires quite a commitment and, unless there is a specific reason for wanting to do this, we recommend your blog is onsite.

So, Andy, a blog can be a fantastic part of your online marketing mix, but you must be prepared to implement and manage it correctly – and if you don’t have the time for that, there’s always LeadGenerators!

Hope this helps Andy.

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