Saturday, March 17, 2012

Blog vs Website for Business

Just like you, there are plenty of entrepreneurs who are pondering if they should create a blog or website. Before you make a decision about having a blogs vs website, let's talk more about what a blog actually is. A real blog is nothing more than web logs where a person writes content (called posts) on a specific subject. The posts are in sequential order and include the date it was posted.

Each time you post content to your blog, your blog visitors are able to write comments about what you have written. Having this kind of interplay with your site visitors is brilliant because it enables you to build kind of a community that folks can come back to.

Blogs have come a ways from just being a one page web log of varied posts and comments. Now you can have what some like to call a regular or “static” website made on blogging platform. The nice thing about this is that you now don't need to have 2 separate sites – you can have a blog and regular website one platform. Having a blog incorporated with your website on the same domain is the most effective way of doing things.

If you have a separate blog that's not on your domain, your main website won't benefit from all of the SEO power that your blog creates for your domain. This SEO power is created because of all of the new blog post content that will reside on your domain. The search engines love when a site posts new content. When you create a website that has a blog on the same domain, your website’s PageRank and authority will increase.

Put simply, Google and the other search engines will love your site and give it a higher rank on their results list. The fact that visitors have the power to make comments under your posts will also help with an increase in your authority.

Another benefit to having a blog is that it's easier to add social media sharing buttons to the base of your posts. These buttons remind your visitors to share your posts with their friends on social media sites. This will give you a link from their account to your page causing an increase in traffic to your site.

So why not just create a blog?

There are plenty of advantages to having a blog, but there are some downsides too.

Old blog entries will not look important due to the date on them (as well as it's going to be tougher for your visitors to find those old posts), and the home page itself won’t targeted enough to be a correct home page.

Blogs are very good when you create original content, but the construction of them makes it tougher for visitors to find what they are searching for. The last thing that you need is for your important information to be tough to find. That's the reason why you need to create static web pages (AKA "regular web pages") where the content stays on the page rather than "falling off the page" like a blog post eventually would.

What you can do is use your blog post to announce the content that you create on a static web page. By doing this you are also making your website more SEO friendly, because now you have more internal links on your site (pages of your website interlinked to other pages in the same site).

When you create a website, it’s important that your home page is focused on a clear call to action. By having a blog, the content on the home page will steadily change each time you make a post, and that takes away from being focused.

So the bottom line is this: You shouldn't choose between having a blog or website - you need to take advantage of having the benefits that both will give you when they are on the same domain. The easiest way to do this is to create a wordpress website.

Friday, March 2, 2012

How to Create Your Own Website That Increases Sales

When you decide that you want to create a website, it can be tough to know what to do being that there are so many web design solutions on the market. The simplest way to make a decision on which one to use is to ensure you select software that will enable you to easily search engine optimize your site without needing to know website code like Html, PHP, CSS, etc.

Many beginners select "do it yourself" website creation solutions based totally on user friendliness and price. Naturally, you want an inexpensive simple solution, but there is however another missing element that must be addressed, and that's search website friendliness. The software that you use to create your website should make it simple for you to search engine optimize the site. Enhancing certain SEO elements on your web pages will help your site get higher rankings in the search engines.

Fact is, most DIY web design solution providers with software that allows you to create your own website don't tell you how significant On Page SEO is. This is often because their software is too limited for search engine optimization purposes.

They'll brag about how easy their software is to use, the low cost, and how it is possible for you to create an attractive website without knowing any web programming, but they won't concentrate on search engine optimization. There are software companies that will mention search engine optimization, but they focus mostly on meta tags as if that's the only part of on page SEO.

There's much more to optimizing your site after you include your meta tags, and you won't have a correctly optimized site if you don't concentrate on all of the other website optimization elements. The most important thing you should think about when making a customer attracting website is to ensure that you have selected web design software that was built with SEO and conversions in mind.

If your potential customers can’t find your website in Google when they're online searching for something that your offer, then there’s no point in even having a website; no matter how good it looks. Your site will just be another pretty web property that nobody sees.

After you find software that is focused on all aspects of optimization, you then can start considering price and simplicity. If you really want to learn how to create your own website, don’t listen to all the sales hype out there – do your due diligence and choose wisely.