Blogging

By definition; A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often offer commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although many focus on photographs, videos or audio. The word blog can also be used as a verb, meaning adding an entry to a blog.

Yeah... OK, What is a Blog?

Your website provides a description of your services, products and yourself. Unfortunately, updating a website can be a tedious, time consuming and an expensive option. Blogs though, allow you to update a portion of your website whenever and however you like. This can be helpful if something needs to be updated regularly, like; dates, pricing or personal viewpoints.

At Roadside Multimedia, we provide updates to the HTML pages regularly when providing Search Engine Positioning (SEP). This should not be confused with updating any Flash content as those updates require many more resources to implement and must be charged for. In contrast, the SEP department does not charge for providing updates to the HTML portion of your website.

A blog can also be setup to allow feedback from your readers. If a visitor to your website has questions or comments, these can be incorporated into the blog itself by the visitor; much like an online forum.

Is a Blog Important to Search Engine Optimization?

In a word; probably. The nature of a blog is to allow easy updating so a running commentary can be kept up. The search engines want to see regular updates made to a website. These search engines also will only produce search results for phrases contained on your website within the text. A blog provides a means to add content regularly by the site owner, content that gives the search engines more text to peruse and phrases to associate to your website. The more text the better when it comes to search engine optimization. But it should be understood that for a blog to work the content needs to be updated every week or so. So, before you commit to adding a blog to your website, make sure that this is something that you are going to keep on top of. If your Blog is not updated regularly then the search engines will quickly treat its content as stale and unimportant.

Do I Need a Blog?

I would strongly recommend adding a blog to your website if you are going to keep up on the adding of content to it. A blog requires an investment of your time if it is going to make a noticeable difference with the search engines, although the time required need not be large once you understand the tools.

Just as important as a blog is the updating of content to your website's HTML pages. If you are not wanting to use the blog option, then provide your optimization company fresh content to use on your webpages. A blog would work better for someone who stays on top of updates on a weekly basis. But, if you are only going to update every month or so then update the static pages of your website instead. By adding webpages to your site you increase its pagerank. An update to the static webpages is just as important as keeping your blog updated, only you do not have to do so quite as often.

In conclusion, if you are going to be making regular updates to your website then Blogging is an excellent tool and should be considered.