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April 29, 2008
Should You Put A Blog On Your Site?
By Scott Goodyear
Two of the most common questions that people ask about online marketing is, 'should I put a blog on my site?' and 'how do I get my site indexed quickly?'. The answer, in many cases, is yes and perhaps with your blog. If you want to be indexed by Google and other engines quickly, the answer is often "get a blog". While I won't get into all of the pitfalls of having a blog, I did want to show you one small indexing benefit that is related to having a blog...
If you go into Google right now and search on: market position, you will see that our blog's domain is indexed. If you click on the "cached" option, you will also see that Google states that they last indexed this page on April 27, 2008.
Yet, I wrote a post earlier today. Today is the 29th. Yet, Google has already been to MarketPosition and they have indexed my earlier post.
As you will undoubtedly hear in many places, blogs get indexed pretty quickly. It's true. The example above, proves this. But, does this mean that your normal web site updates are indexed as quickly, if you have a blog? Not necessarily. But it doesn't hurt.
Can I Drop Links From My Web Site Into My Blog?
My take is that you can drop links from your blog, to important pages on your site. If the link and content is appropriate, even your blog's visitors might appreciate knowing that there is something new on your site. They may link to the new pages as well, which can be a plus in other ways.
Provided that your blog is not a splog (spamblog) - with just links to your product pages or other non-interesting content, you should be OK. These links on topical pages can help get non-blog pages in the queue for being indexed rather than just waiting for Googlebot to randomly find them and index those pages at some point in the future.
If you had a large web site, similar to say Amazon.com, you might add dozens of pages and still not have them indexed unless they are linked to from a visitor, from the home page of your site, a good site map, etc. While some engines may ping existing pages in order to see if they've changed (search on "If Modified Since"), they are checking old pages that they already know about.
If you need an example of a positive way to drop links, forget that that Movable Type is a blog software company for a second. Here is a post where they point to an open source version of their software and link drop to various areas of their site. This post is not spammy and generally fits into the same topical themes that their official movable type blog normally covers.
Observation About The Google WebMaster Tools Area
As an aside, I'm a fan of the Google WebMaster Tools area. By submitting to Google, waiting for their bot to come by, having them index your blog, etc. that doesn't mean that all of the areas of Google are up to date with one another. I know, it is a little confusing. They have many data centers and various ways in which they might categorize dates, copies of indexes, etc.
As you can see above, despite indexing my blog post today, their Webmaster tools area says that they last indexed Market Position back on the 27th.
Summary
A blog can be helpful. They are often indexed quicker than a normal site. A blog can be used to point search engine robots to new, non-blog content on your site. If you check various areas in Google, in order to see how their indexing of your site is coming along, don't get disheartened, not all of Google's tools, dates, and other data always match up.
← What is this?
can I assume that a discussion forum would be the same as a blog as the forum software is often more versatile.
Posted by Bryan at May 6, 2008 06:17 PM
Both forums and blogs have their good and bad points... It is often how the technology is implemented and what the over all look/feel which determines just what is a blog and what what is a forum.
"forum software is often more versatile."
Depending on what you are using, blog software can be pretty versatile as well.
Posted by Scott Goodyear at May 6, 2008 08:08 PM
Thanks for that perspective about adding a blog to the Web Site.
I've thought but have not done this as yet. Actually not sure how. I have GoDaddy as a site host. I'll give them a call to see how this might be accomplished.
John McLaughlin, Stock Day Trader's - Consultant / Coach
Thanks again
Posted by TheTraderCoach at May 6, 2008 09:26 PM
Hi John,
Many hosting companies use CPanel, WHM, or similar products to allow for plenty of plug in applications like blogs.
http://www.cpanel.net/
Looking at GoDaddy, they have several blog types available including:
Geeklog
Lifetype
reBlog
Serendipity
WordPress
and several community apps like:
Drupal
Joomla
Xoops
You'll have to experiment and see which works best for you. If it works like my past experiences with CPanel, you can install an app and toy with it. If it seems too complicated, nuke it and try one of the others. In most of these cases it is a bit complicated but rewarding to learn a bit more about the systems and coding behind the blogs because they can be pretty powerful.
While it's not the only novice solution out there, you can also try Google's "blogger". As long as you know at least a small amount of HTML you can put some token HTML on a page and set blogger to login to your web server and replace a file when you post to blogger.
Posted by Scott Goodyear at May 6, 2008 09:47 PM
Hello Scott,
Since you are an SEO pro I would love to discuss the fact that people like Andy Beard and seomoz.org both believe that blogs are ranked differently by Google than static websites. Here is a little of what they have had to say....
Google judges the quality of the blog by:
How many RSS subscribers you have in Google Reader.
How many blogrolls you are in and the quality of the blog roll as a whole.
The quality of your blog roll.
The quality of the outgoing links in your blogposts, the number of links and the keywords you used in them.
There is allot more so I wrote a Squidoo lens about this here:
http://www.squidoo.com/blog-seo
What do you think Scott?
Posted by Chris Lang at May 7, 2008 04:37 AM
In the past I was convinced that there was not much difference between which blog or content management system a person would use.
However, that was yesterday's opinion not todays. Since starting a blog about technology and ministry at www.FromChurch.com I have become convinced that creating Wordpress blogs is a superior strategy for quickly generating traffic.
I have used other content management solutions like joomla and mambo and post-nuke, but when I created my first self hosted wordpress blog, learned how to tweak my picks, and change the permalinks - I was amazed when I had to increase my bandwidth for the site because of the hits I was getting.
I now encourage any pastor that I work with to consider setting up a ministry blog immediately. Even if they have it linked from their church site, it is a strategy that works for internet ministry and I imagine any writer, speaker, or consultant would get simular results.
Of course content is still king - but you can easily create content about whatever you are passionate enough to have a website about.
Thanks for your article.
In Him,
JMb <><
www.1000churches.org
www.poorpreacher.com
www.ifeelgod.org
www.youcanplaygospel.com
Posted by Bishop James I Feel God Brown at May 7, 2008 06:51 AM
Hi Chris,
I think that those could indeed be measures of quality. I don't believe that there is any one thing that puts a site over the top. Rather, I'd think that if anything, in order to help avoid being "gamed", that the engines have variable weighting to things like RSS feeds, blog rolls, etc.
As I argue over there, http://www.marketposition.com/blog/archives/2008/03/ranking_argumen.html
there are factors beyond links that can help a site's rankings... it's not always clear what they are or how they are weighted. SEOChat and WMW for example are sure to be on more SEO blog rolls than MarketPosition and they've been around almost as long.
And Danny Sullivan's newer site, SearchEngineLand, is sure to be one MANY blog rolls, feed readers, etc. It ranks for "internaional seo" even though this page is quite lite on actual text content:
http://searchengineland.com/080422-132417.php
Blog rolls, feeds to the site and this page, etc. are certainly potential factors in keeping this page afloat in the rankings.
Interestingly enough... although the intent wasn't to spam or what not, it is almost "duplicate content" in nature as compared to:
http://searchengineoptimization.elliance.com/search-marketing-resources/seo-infographics.aspx?title=International-SEO-Tips&Category=
Posted by Scott Goodyear at May 7, 2008 05:34 PM
