Blogs – The Good and the Bad

A blog combined with good quality content creates a lot of value – value that can be used and marketed across different online channels. Through content, a blog allows a business to market itself. Used wisely, the content posted on a blog makes businesses benefit exposure mainly from search engine traffic and social media. The content itself would probably target different keywords from sections on the main website making the posts rank for different keywords and traffic. By having more content on search engines the greater will traffic and visitors to the company's website be. A blog exposes the visitors directly to the company’s products and services. When a company gains higher visibility on search engines and when users become more and more familiar with the company, the greater the chances that the user will think about the company when requiring such services or products.

Blog posts normally link between other pages on the website – this increases the links pointing to the pages to the website plus optimised anchor text provides added weight. Besides increasing internal links, blogs increase links from other websites that would have found the content of the blog useful. This is one of the major benefits for a company to have a blog since it will drive more readers to the website and boost SEO due to the increase of links from external sources.  Another advantage of blogs is that new and fresh content is created on the website. Fresh content makes a website more SEO friendly by providing a reason for search engines to visit and index your website.

After having created a blog post, the content could be posted on the company's social media presence which will take blogging to the next level. The reach, exposure, and traffic could potentially increase further. The content posted will also contribute to engage with users on social media. The followers, both on social media and on the blog, will develop a certain degree of trust towards the company. This will lead in creating a community where people will follow the company presence on social media and read the content regularly. Blogging together with the promotion through SEO and social media will at the end generate new leads and sales.

On the other hand one of the main problems with blogging is that producing content is often very time consuming. Content takes time to develop. A blog must be updated regularly and most companies do not have the internal resources and skills for content writing – this is why when writing a blog, it is very important that the content is written by an expert. This way the blog is kept alive and new content keeps the readers interested. Blogging can become time consuming to maintain but in the end, the benefits definitely outnumber the disadvantages.

The main importance of a blog is to have it hosted on the main company domain. Opting for a free solution hosted on another domain may be easier to set up, but the overall benefits from the links acquired and traffic will be less effective, since, all links and traffic will not end up to the company website.

Conrad Bugeja is an SEO and PPC Consultant in the Internet Marketing division of Alert eBusiness (www.alertemarketing.com)