Jason Wersits, April 27, 2012
Many businesses these days are looking for ways to build up an online audience without having to pour endless hours into social networks. Facebook, Google+ and Twitter all serve as excellent venues for interacting with customers and brand followers, but their streamlined interfaces often lead to content that feels stilted and formulaic. Although company owners clearly want to always be on the minds of its followers, the limited space and compartmentalization of these websites greatly hinder the level of exposure that social media can offer. This is especially true in the case of smaller businesses that may not be on a potential reader's radar at all.
It's due to dilemmas such as these that blog maintenance is quickly becoming a bigger focus for companies hailing from every industry. Regardless of whether a business sells consumer electronics or creates custom furniture, there will always be at least a handful of people who are interested in a product. While some small business owners may look at blogs as being a waste of time, the fact is that they serve a useful role in the overall SEO process.
A well-written and regularly updated blog has the potential to contain content that lands high up in Google and Bing SERPs. As an organic SEO method and one focused on quality, company blogs have become a regular practice for white hat search engine optimization. Fortunately, getting started with this medium is not particularly difficult as all it takes is choosing the right place to host one's content. The following are two major sites for blog activity which I personally recommend to would-be corporate bloggers.
Blogspot: Blog Generation Made Easy
Google's Blogspot/Blogger network is easily the most accessible of all the current blog websites around today. For the past several years, the network has given its users free access to a blog service that is easy to use, has plenty of good-looking template options and can be updated without any hassle. Even if a company has little to no experience managing a blog, Blogspot provides enough streamlined features and functionality to allow anyone to produce good-looking content.
Wordpress: The Go-To Blog Site for Professionals
There's a reason why Wordpress has become the most prevalent source of corporate blogs. Where-as Blogspot offers an accessible interface, Wordpress delivers far more tools into developer hands. It's unsurprising that many companies actually use the blog site as the network upon which they build their own official websites. By allowing site users to edit their blogs with HTML and their own original assets, the potential for content generation through Wordpress is staggering to say the least. While it is most certainly not for the novice, the website does allow skilled web developers to flex their muscles.
Having done quite a bit of writing on both of these websites, I highly recommend that new users start with Blogspot. Wordpress can offer a lot of challenges and is a less stable platform than Blogspot. For additional blog advice, I can be contacted at jwersits@webimax.com.
