Hopefully by now you will understand that a business blog is a very powerful way to build trust, online credibility and to position your business as being an expert in your industry.

Having a business blog can drastically improve your organic search engine rankings by providing you with an excellent way to adding fresh regular keyword rich content.

Once you have made the decision to add a blog to your website you need to consider which  blogging platform to use. Will your blog be part of your website or be a sub domain of your website domain, adding value to the whole domain –  or will it be on a seperate dedicated domain?

What are your Blogging Software choices?

There are a few options open to you and we will comment below on the most popular:

1.      Blogger: Blogger.com is owned by Google and the good news is, it is free! Blogger provides a good blogging platform, especially for the beginner blogger. The hosting of your blog is also provided free  on blogspot.com. Setting  up your new blog on Blogger is both quick  and easy.

So what is the catch? – The main drawback is that blogger gives you very limited options  to customise or personalise the look and feel of your blog, for example you cannot make it look like your website.  Because it is hosted away from your business website, on a separate server, there is little organic search ranking benefit.

 2.      WordPress.com:  WordPress.com provides a similar service to Blogger and you can create a blog on the WordPress.com domain that is again hosted for free. Improved customisation options are provided by way of a good selection of ‘themes’ (designs) however the same SEO issues mentioned above with the Blogger option remain.  Nevertheless this is a great tool to start a blog for people with a limited budget.

 3.      WordPress.org: WordPress.org offers a free open source blogging platform which you can download and run on your own hosting account. You have complete control over the blog functionality and you can also customise the look and feel so that your blog can reflect your existing corporate brand.

Another plus is that you can install many third-party plugins, themes and features on your WordPress blog.

The only downside is that it is more difficult to set up the blog than the hosted options explained above, but blogs on the wordpress.org platform offers the best SEO (search engine optimisation) results for your website.

Our recommendation

We  highly recommend using the WordPress.org blogging software (option 3 above) because you have the flexibility to host your business blog on the same domain as your website or you can create a dedicated domain for your blog.  Having your blog on the same domain as your website e.g. www.wsiims.co.uk/blog  not only adds keyword rich content regularly to your website but it will also attract links from many other bloggers as well. Your blog can quickly become a ‘linking magnet’ and the benefits of having good quality inbound links to your website are considerable from a SEO standpoint.

Your business blog will attract new visitors as they discover your blog posts which are broadcast to the internet via RSS (Real Simple Syndication).  Once your blog has become established the search engines will list your blog postings literally within minutes of publishing the post. Many visitors will come to your blog and will then likely look at other pages within your website to see what you do and who you are.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help you to set up an effective business blog visit WSIIMS