What is a Blog and why how does it help you promote your web site?
This is a pretty basic question, but one that a lot of folks don’t know the answer to… it’s quite possible to even be a very successful webmaster or even an SEO expert and not have the faintest idea what this blogging craze is all about.
In this piece I’m going to concentrate on the commercial aspects of why blogs are important - rather than the fact they allow non-technical people to publish news/information web sites (which is another important aspect of blogs)
First the basics: A blog is kind of like having your own news web site, where you can post stories using blogging software (rather than creating HTML pages manually).
Most blogs allow you to have visitors participate in discussions/comments after each story, although this can be usually turned off if you prefer. We’ve turned off comments on this blog.
So why are blogs important for promoting your site or online business?
The key things are:
- Blogs have an RSS news feed. This allows people with newsreader software/services to pick up (”subscribe”) and other sites to pick up and potentially even republish (”syndicate”), your latest stories.
- Blogs have a “ping” mechanism. This notifies various services that you have posted a new story and allows them to quickly (often immediately) spider it and add it to their indexes. This is in contrast to the traditional SEO marketing method where you have to wait (often weeks if not months) for a search engine spider to periodically visit your site, and hope that it spots changes and indexes them.
Compare our main company site - www.ans2000.com versus our company blog - blog.ans2000.com.
There are three important differences to note:
- The pages at www.ans2000.com are built by hand using HTML. Whereas the pages at blog.ans2000.com are built using the blogging software. Notice the calendar, archive functions, the organization of stories into categories in the blog? All that stuff is maintained totally automatically by the blogging software whenever we post a new story. We don’t even have to do 1 second’s worth of work to get these features.
- Notice the RSS buttons (”chicklets”) on the blog. They allow people with newsreader software/services to subscribe and be notified of updates to our blog.
- If you click the top “XML” button on the blog, you can even see what is in the RSS feed (which is what news readers and syndicators use). It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to the average person looking at in a web browser, but news readers and syndicators can understand all that code and those funny XML tags, and make use of them as noted above.
- You can’t see it, but when we post a new story via the blogging software and hit “Publish”, the blogging software automatically notifies (”pings”) a whole of bunch of services that our blog has been updated, telling them that the new story should be indexed as soon as possible.
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