Articles > Social Media - Why Do I Need It? > Blogs - do you need one?
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Blogs - do you need one?Do you need a Blog on your website?Several clients have asked me this question. Before answering it, we need to specify just what exactly is a blog. This is done very well in this article by our Design Director, Hamish Braddick. "Essentially a blog is just website content. It maybe set up as a category within a company website or it maybe set up as a standalone website with its own unique domain name. The purpose of a blog is provide a vehicle for individuals or businesses to publish regular and timely articles. These articles are like separate entries in a diary. They document news, an event, an idea, thoughts etc. So what's the difference between a blog and ordinary website content? Technically the difference between blogs and ordinary website content, is the fact that the articles are categorised by "time" Most blogs are also categorised by theme as well as time. Blogs often have other features such as the ability for users to add comments or subscribe to an RSS feed. With ordinary website content, a webmaster will spend a great deal of time crafting an article. As things change, this article will usually be updated and added to. The article grows and evolves. The difference with a blog article is that it usually does not change. Users will add comments and a discussion might grow beneath it but the article itself remains unchanged. If there are changes to the subject of the blog, a new up-to-date blog/article will be added to the website. Blog articles are often written in a more conversational tone; they are usually less polished - a bit raw. And that is acceptable to users. This is similar to videos on YouTube - a professional video is less common; the raw, immediate footage is what we want to see. How does a blog help with SEO? A blog, itself, does not help with a search engine rank - it is the content that helps. It doesnt matter if you call it a blog, or articles, or resources or news or events or What's New? If you publish good quality content that people are interested in, then people will link to it and the search engines will notice. Users are increasingly interested in timely, up-to-date content and the search engines are changing to deliver these results. Blogs or timely content are becoming more and more relevant and valuable to the search engines; accordingly blogs are obtaining higher rankings in some areas. You can use a stand alone blog, for example, on WordPress. But if you use a stand alone blog, you will dilute all of the inbound links to your website. If the primary goal of a blog is to generate lots of inbound links, you really want them to be boosting your website. Blogs & Social networking Blogs and social networking go hand in hand. When you publish a new blog article, you need to broadcast it to let everyone know that might be interested. This is where a Twitter following comes in handy, or Facebook, or email, or RSS feeds (though I feel it is only a small technical minority who use RSS feeds). It works the other way too - if you decide to announce something important to your Twitter followers, you need an article to link to......this is where a blog comes in handy. You can't fit much more than a title and a link in your 140 characters on Twitter. Comments/Forum The real power and key difference of a blog is "comments." Comments allow users to contribute to the article, it allows users to question the article and it allows the publisher to connect and engage in a conversation with their users. The solution? If you want a blog, you first need to understand the purpose of it and understand the work involved.
Zeald.com website owners can visit the Zeald.com Learning centre to view a great example of a Zeald.com website used as a blog: http://help.zeald.com/WhatsNew.html Non Zeald readers can use free 3rd party blogging software such as https://www.blogger.com/start |