Your Friend on the Web, Diana Ratliff

Website Strategy & Digital Consulting

Blogging

Ozark Cabins Website | WordPress Theme

I just finished a site for the owners of Rock Eddy Bluff Farm in Dixon, MO.  Owners Tom & Kathy Corey had been doing their website for years, and in their own words “it just grew like Topsy and before long there were loads of pages, a format that did not fit many computers, and a general lack of maintenance that was noticeable.”

Their goal was a modern, easy-to-manage website that still had the rustic feel of their country resort.  The site was built with a very user-friendly WordPress theme so that it was affordable as well as easy to manage themselves.  Tom is an avid blogger so we also connected their blog to their Facebook page and are still tweaking the settings on that.  I did a logo for them too.

Rock Eddy Bluff Farm

 

I really enjoyed doing this site and it sounds like a wonderful place to visit if you want to relax, de-stress and get away from the hustle and bustle for a while.  Some of these Ozark cabins and cottages are right out of the 1800s, what a refreshing change that would be!

 

Is your blog in the wrong location?

For optimal benefit – your blog should be on your website, on your domain name – NOT at blogger.com or blogspot.com.

I’ve talked to several business owners in the last week who are interested in hiring me for SEO (search engine optimization) work.

All have blogs – which is smart – but all have their blogs at blogspot.com.  Not so smart.

For maximum search engine benefit, your blog posts need to be on your own website, your own domain name.  In other words, your blog’s URL should be something like:

http://www.comoaccountant.com/blog/
instead of
http://comoaccountant.blogspot.com.

(No, linking TO your blog from your main website isn’t the same thing.)

If your blog is well-established and has been around a long time and has some good links to it and has some PageRank (in other words, if Google sees it as a popular/important site) – then it can be valuable, wherever it’s hosted.  And having a valuable site link back to your main site is a good thing.

BUT most blogs don’t get that big or that popular – and you lose the search engine benefit of having the blog posts on your own domain name.

You see, when you blog you’re adding keyword-rich content to your site, which the search engines love.  And you’re updating your site, showing the search engines that your content is fresh and relevant – which they ALSO love.

You’re most likely to be blogging at an external site if your primary site is built in HTML instead of in WordPress.  You have to install WordPress separately, which requires some technical expertise.  That’s how my site is set up right now; WordPress is installed in a subfolder of my domain.

However, I’m now converting my site to WordPress for the whole thing – and that’s one reason WordPress is such a popular site-building platform these days.  It has that blog functionality is built right in.

Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesperson, recommends installing your blog on your own domain – and that’s good enough for me.  If SEO is one of your major reasons for blogging, this is a change you ought to make.