Why Build a Blog for Your Small Business?

Just getting your business out on the web? How are you going to rise above the thousands of  similar businesses that are probably in the same space as you are? Do a search on your business niche and you may find well established competition who will place higher than you will in the search engines unless you find a way to get the search engines to notice you. A blog can help immensely with this.

Search engines like blogs because:

• Relevancy – The content tends to be very focused on a specific topic, even one topic per page
• Current – Blogs tend to be frequently updated so the content stays fresh and up-to-date
• Tags - Tagging posts makes it easy for a search engine to categorize the content and filter it for delivery
• Headlines and Titles – The H1 and H2 tags typically used for blog titles are easy for a search engine to categorize.
• Code – Blogs are generally optimized for Search engines don’t have to wade through style sheets and table tags to get to the good stuff.
• Navigation – Blogs have a standard navigation that is easy for search engines (and humans) to follow

I’m not going to go too deeply into SEO for blogs in this post, but look for a post on blogging for search engines later this week. Let’s just leave it at this. Search engines often prefer a blog over a static web site.

Do it yourself. Really
Blogs are easy to edit yourself so you can quickly go in and update your own content, fine tune the phrasing or add a new product or service without having to hire a web developer. You can spend your money on web development and search engine optimization tricks or you can put up a blog and be a step ahead of your competitors static web site. Sure, you might want to hire a designer to tweak a good theme like Thesis for Wordpress  to have it fit your brand and preferred look and feel, but it’s probably going to cost you a whole lot less than a static site that needs a pro to update.

Bottom line?
Blogs are an inexpensive way to get information out on the web and be found by search engines and you can update the information yourself.

Tagged as: Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Thesis, Website