When it comes to creating and managing a blog to help to generate increased traffic to your website you have two basic choices.
The first is to create the blog using a tool such as Blogger or WordPress. These two, and other, dedicated blogging platforms are often free and easy to use, with straightforward content management systems and hosting services, and it can be quite tempting to create your blog using one of them.
The second choice, which is the one that we prefer, is to incorporate your blog into your website. This means that your blog will be created as a sub-directory of your site, with the same primary website address.
There are certain distinct advantages to the latter approach, which, we believe, will make the decision about how best to ensure that your blog boosts the profile of your website, a fairly easy one.
The Advantages of Incorporating Your Blog Onto Your Site
1. Site Content
The first advantage of putting your blog on your own website, rather than on an external platform, is that your site will receive direct benefit from the search engines (which will lead to a greater internet prominence, and, in turn, an increase in the number of visitors to you website) because of the new content that you add to the blog. Every time you add new, original content to your blog it will be credited as new website content, a very important factor in the evaluation of your site by the search engines. If your blog is on a separate platform your site will simply not receive the same rewards for the content that is posted on it.
2. Keywords
The strategic placing of keywords on a website, especially long-tail keywords, with a view to generating increased traffic, is an essential part of any present-day search engine optimisation policy. One of the main advantages of placing keywords on your onsite blog is that they are immediately recognised by the search engines as being directly relevant to your site’s overall content. When long tail keyword linking is managed skilfully, it can be an invaluable source of traffic to your site. The particular advantage of long-tail keywords on your onsite blog is that you will be able to direct your visitors seamlessly to another page, or pages, on your website that directly relate to the search terms that brought them to your blog content in the first place, whilst keeping them on the same internet domain. Whilst it is possible to achieve this through an external blog platform, it is less likely because of the “distance” between the blog and your site.
3. Internal Links
Search engines are no longer interested in just the home page of a website. They are now far more likely to value a website by reference to its overall content and the quality of the in-depth site experience that it offers to its users. Internal links, which direct visitors to and from relevant pages, are a vital tool for raising the profile of your website. Equally importantly, many internet users who access a blog as a result of an internet search that they have made, are more reluctant to click on a link that takes them to an external site than to one that takes them to a new page on the same site.
Summary
It can be tempting to choose an external platform for your blog. Without doubt, platforms like Blogger and WordPress, have many qualities and we would not argue with their suitability for those who simply want a standalone blog.
However, for anyone who wants to create and maintain a dynamic blog to complement and enhance the presence of a commercial website, placing and managing the blog “onsite” is the best strategy.
Image Credit: Thomas Schimdt
