The Importance of Blogs for Companies

For companies, small or large, blogs have become a MUST have.  There are several advantages to maintaining a blog for your company.  For starters, blogs are an important opportunity to communicate with clients and add to marketing, branding and public relations purposes. They prove to be an official platform where businesses can display official information like company news, new product launches etc.

Your company blog is the place where employees can tell people what your company knows and what makes you different from other companies that you are competing with.  Your blog gives your company a voice! It is wise to take advantage of that voice and form trusted relationships with your viewers.  Blogs have proved over time to be an extremely beneficial tool for a large number of companies throughout the globe in various fields of businesses.

With your blog, your viewers have the ability to comment on and share your content.  With comments from your readers about their views, it creates an environment in which you get to communicate and learn more about your readers and get to know them better. You form a relationship.  You will also be able to find out what your readers' would like to read about, their choices, their views, their wants etc., which can further assist you in creating good content in the future and developing potential sales.

The share feature of a blog allows readers to share your content with a much larger audience.  This creates brand awareness and increases traffic to your site.  If you didn't already know, Facebook (24%), email (11.1%), and Twitter (10.8%) are among the most popular methods for sharing content on the Web today.

You should also know that social bookmarking and user-generated news sites like Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit are also among the top sources for sharing information online.  By creating great content on your blog, you attract visitors to your site and when that visitor decides to share your content, you create "buzz" about your company. 

Blog SEO Benefits

Blogs are essentially web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites.

• Structured Content: Blog software with category features allows you to categorize your content. The easier you make it for search engines to understand your content, the better chance you have of ranking well on those topics.
• Crawlable URLs:  The majority of blogs today offer uncomplicated URL structure.  This makes it less difficult for search engine spiders to find and crawl your blog content.
• Internal Links: Blogs that write about product or service related information have the option to deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This improves your ranking for long tail phrases.
• Inbound Links: Blogs link freely to each other - much more than web sites do. They are a significant source of content to social news and social media web sites. This includes text, audio and video!  The more media included in your blog, the more likely it will attract incoming links.
• RSS Feeds:  Links to RSS feed urls that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity.  When RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic to your site.
• Fresh Content: Search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. Creating fresh content also means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Updating your content is also an indication of an authorative website. 
  
• Active Community:  An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites that search engines tend to reward in the rankings.
• Non-Search Traffic:  Blogs allow you to generate substantial amounts of traffic via RSS and acquire links that have NOTHING to do with search engines.  Essentially you are creating a portal for incoming traffic, simply by writing down your thoughts. 
  
• Blog & RSS Directories: With a blog and corresponding RSS feeds, your site will benefit from visibility within blog and RSS search engines. Web sites without feeds are not included in these kinds of directories and search engines. 

Posted February 11, 2010 | Read all posts by Liz Wood