There has been much discussion around the office lately about posting to a blog or creating content for a blog.
Simple questions such as:
“What do we post or write about?”
“Does the blog have to SEO related and in what tone are the posts written in?”
“Why exactly do we need a blog?” or “What is a blog?”
All valid questions with a variety of answers which in due time shall be posted here.
First off, what is a blog?
Searching the internet, one will get a diverse set of answers:
Some of the answers found include:
It’s an online journal/diary posted on the web for the entire world to see
or
A blog is like an online journal or diary. The word came from web log, which was shortened to blog.
better yet …
Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.
For a more detailed definition, visit the Wikipedia blog definition.
Industry bloggers
To get a better idea about what a blog is, it’s great to look at some examples of individuals and companies using blogs to get their message, thoughts and ideas out to the masses.
A simple way to get started is to search out industry related blogs on Google.
Because we are in the Search Engine Optimization industry, we would search out “Search Engine Optimization Blogs” or “SEO blogs” on Google.
The search engine results leads us to some interesting finds about this topic. There are bloggers out there posting at a variety of times (daily, weekly, monthly). Most bloggers are posting about search engine optimization, while some get sidetracked a bit and start posting about the latest software tools they may be using, what they had for lunch or even how their plane ride was to the most recent SEO convention.
We like to keep up to date with what the major search engine are doing and what some of the insight may be from their camps.
The official Google Blog is crammed with information from product managers, software engineers and some interesting key insiders.
As one will notice, there are a variety of blogs on their site with links to their various products , projects and initiatives.
Keeping it informal
Probably the best advise I like to give for potential bloggers is:
keep it simple,
informal,
to the topic of your web site
and have a bit of fun with your blog
There are a number of benefits for having a blog on your site, even if you do not know what to write about. Sometimes an idea may come to mind, that may not justify writing a new page on your web site, and you simply want to post it out there to see what kind of reaction you may get. A blog may be good for this as well.
Over time, we hope to explore topics such as “Does my company need a blog?”, “What are the search engine optimization benefits of having a blog?” and “How easy is it to maintain a blog?”.
Have fun!
