Integrating Your Blog With Your Website

If you have a website and have added a blog to get the flow through traffic benefits you need to cross link both your blog and your website.

It is easy to link your blog to your website. It is typically done in the footer of the page as well as in the sidebar. You can even deep link to your website by using the BlogRoll option in WordPress if you are not HTML savvy.

On the website side, it is best if you include your blog as an important link in your main navigation. I have seen some times link only in their footer and this is a missed opportunity as your site visitor will typically be focused on the top level navigation. Remember that the top right section of your page is hot real estate. Having a button, icon or image to point people to your blog at this location builds on eye tracking studies and will drive traffic from your website to blog effectively.

Don't have the links to your blog be secondary in nature or added as an after thought. Blog traffic needs your initial assistance by heavily linking from your website to your blog in an effective and comprehensive way. Don't set your blog up for traffic problems by not doing your part to effectively integrate it into your website.

Use Feedburner For Blog Feed Tracking

Feedburner has been around for a while and just last year Google bought this interesting free tool. That should tell you something right there, when Google buys something, it has increased perceived value.

Feedburner allows you to make your RSS or Atom feed generated by your blog or e-newsletter user-friendly. Providing it in a format that matches the feed reader of your subscribers. It can turn an Atom feed into an RSS 2.0 feed or other version of RSS feed. It will track your activity and subscriptions with the new PRO tools that are now free to all, and will even allow you to send your blog posts as emails to subscribers.

Previously I have been leery of losing my domain tag on my feed address, but I have decided that the information and ability to track performance is more important than keeping my domain name tag on my feed.

Feedburner is easy to implement with WordPress and New Blogger auto-install widgets. So if you haven't checked out Feedburner, now's the time to take the leap and to know more about your news feed, reach, and subscribers.

Blog Piracy and Hostage Holding

Well now I have seen it all. I have a client for whom we do ghost blogging and he sent me a note yesterday asking if we could host his blog. It appears that his current blog host had charged $1,500 for blog set up, owned his domain name and blog template, and was charging a whopping $500 a month maintenance fee. On top of that he paid us ghost blogging charges.

It just does not have to cost this much to blog! Hosting for a WordPress blog with auto-publish features and full SEO fields (which I like very much) can be had for $3.39 a month at Go Daddy, blog set up and configuration with a nice free WordPress template can be done for under $199, and you can buy your domain name when you set up hosting with Go Daddy and even own it yourself for $1.99. Scary isn't it the difference!

To be 100% truthful his original blog allowed new authors to create their own blog, but only two people on his blog was using that the rest were just publishing to the main blog. We have been able to set up a plain vanilla WordPress blog at the prices above and allow all of his previous authors to continue to write and categorize their blogs by their business name for easy navigation to their posts.

Blogging and blog set up simply does not have to be expensive and maintenance should never cost this much. If you are paying this much for YOUR blog, you need to contact us to find out how we can save you money and still get the search engine benefits you want.

Blogger Custom FTP or Blogspot Set Up?

Does it make a difference for search engines what your blog set up is at Blogger? No, it does not. I used to believe that only custom FTP blogging provided quality search engine results, but no longer.

I have just completed over four months of research and analysis on this topic and several others and have found that in some cases a Blogspot based blog will outperform a custom FTP blog. I have also found that if you have multiple services on your website, you may be better served if you are blogging mainly for search engines to have a Blogspot based blog on each individual topic. Great idea, but only if you have the time to blog or pay someone to blog on all of them.

It appears from our research that the topics you have much authoritative content will be able to piggyback on your domain if you are custom FTP blogging, but not by much. So if you want the new Blogger, love widgets, want a quick and easy set up, then regular Blogspot set up is perfect for you.

We are now only recommending custom FTP set up when you want a seamless template with your website, want your blog pages included in your local website search engine results or are blogging on a very narrow topic of services where you have much authoritative content back on your website.

You'll be able to read the documentation soon, when we post our white paper title "The Tangible Benefits of Blogging."