SEO Denver

SEO Consultants Denver provides expertise in driving new business sales to your organization via the internet. We carefully analyze your product offering and craft a web outreach solution unique to your organization.  Contact Matt at 303.506.1158 today or visit our SEO and SEM Home Page. 
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SEO Consultants of Denver Blog Post for October 28, 2009

Building an Effective Business Blog – Using the Blog as Your Main Business Page – Part I

SEO is the essential ‘art’ of presenting your company and organization to the world over the internet in a fashion that enables your business page to appear as a result to a user-provided search or question on common search engines.  The search engine connects potential customers with your web site.  This establishes a unique position for your company to both provide useful information and to build credibility.   A company that is knowledgeable, helpful, has credibility and conveys useful information is first in line to make a sale to the consumer reading the page.   SEO Consultants of Denver utilizes a blog environment to attract client business and can put this experience to work for organizations of all sizes. 

Maintaining both a strong web page environment as well as a blog is very time consuming – frequently too time consuming for many entrepreneurs – particularly small business operators that do everything from invoicing to advertising.  Business leaders then must choose how best to invest their time to attract new business and improve sales.  Given your time constraints, what is the best use of available time and resources?

Over the next several days, posts here will discuss the advantages and techniques of using a business blog page to represent the organization on the internet.  Simply put, a business blog can be optimized to drive new business to the organization in the same ways a standard web page can.   For businesses facing the challenge of getting all the work done in a day, operating a blog can keep your business generating revenue by providing useful information to prospective customers and attracting readers – without a huge investment in time or personnel resources.

Operational Advantages of a Business Blog
First, a bit of background…  There are three main operational reasons to operate a blog to attract new business.  Specifically, good operational reasons for operating a blog include:

• Posting and updating a blog is relatively easy,
• A blog environment is easy to maintain– with little or no technical skill required,
• Blog platforms usually format your text so that it can appear as a search result – just describe your posts in the tag section,
• And a fourth little advantage would be:  it is usually free!

Standard Blog Functionality
Blogs are intended to be frequently updated, so most blogging platforms enable easy posting of new information.  These platforms then catalogue your posts and will optimize them to some extent so they will be searchable.  Main web pages are difficult for non technical operators to update and keep fresh.  As the search engines check for changes and updates, keeping the site updated is important to keep your page appearing as results on common search engines. 

Blogs of course allow frequent content posting, but they also allow the author to ‘tag’ or describe the article individually to specify the content.  It is important to think of each blog post as a separate web page that should be accurately described for users as well as search robots to easily understand. 

Attaching a blog to your business environment is as simple as opening an account with a blog platform provider.   There are other, more technical ways of establishing a blog on your home web server environment, but these usually require hiring outside help.  As we all know, ‘outside help’ can be expensive. 

For those that don’t currently have a business blog, it is relatively simple to build one include it in your web environment.  One complication will probably be in making the look and feel of your main web page match the look and feel of your blog.  If you have a custom webpage template and want to use that for your blog, you will have to ensure that it is enabled for the proper plug-ins and upload it to your platform.  This usually requires some technical expertise. If you are inexperienced at this, the help desk can usually guide you through the process.   Or… to keep it simple, you can select a standard blog template from your provider.  Most of these are free a well.

Three Common Reasons for Establishing a Business Blog
In deciding whether to use a blog to attract new business and revenue, consider the following advantages.  A blog can:

• Build credibility,
• Enable frequent communication with your customer base,
• Establish a leadership image as part of your company identity, and
• Ultimately, increase sales and revenue.

Blogging can be a successful way to attract new business if you can create a site that becomes known for providing useful information for your target niche community.   There is no substitute for being the business ‘expert’ or best source of information.  Build this over time and viewers will return often. 

A high number of returning viewers are an important strength, which pays of when promoting your product or service.  Especially if you established a network of folks in the niche community that have set links to your site, your site will appear to new customers searching for specific product or service information.  Your blog page then becomes the spokes-person for your company and also the ‘go-to’ industry expert.  Of course when readers become buyers, yours will be the trusted company to fill the need.

Will Customers Use My Blog?
Customers will generally use web pages as legitimate sources of information.  Still, customers have to know the page is available.  In deciding whether or not to operate a business blog, consider the buying behavior of your target customer group.  Generally, the more time customers take to consider a purchase in your industry, the better chance you will have of using a business blog to capture new revenue.  As readers often utilize the web for product research, a blog that provides product insight and information would be very valuable and may be configured to appear as a search result when the user is seeking information about a specific product or service feature.   Understanding customer behavior also plays an important role in constructing each blog message or post.

Please check back for Part II tomorrow where we will discuss a Blog Message Strategy and sound Structure of the Business Blog.

For more information, please contact SEO Consultants Denver - Matt at 303.506.1158