Whatever the nature of your business you are likely to want an online porthole to your business.  For many years’ people said you needed a website and, just when you had grappled with the idea, the blog came along.

Both have their pros and cons.  Whichever you choose, you should know the difference and more importantly how to use it.

Business Website

A website is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address. Wikipedia

Unless you have HTML knowledge, its best to leave website design to the experts! They can create bespoke, one-off creations that can be user-friendly and design specific to reach your online audience.

For example I worked with the fabulous webreality.co.uk to produce an outstanding hospice website.  I needed a website that reflected ‘hope’ as well as having strong event and donating capabilities, as it needs to raise over £2million in funding each year.  The result was this stunning new website  jerseyhospicecare.com

Alternatively if you have a good level of technical ‘know how’ and the patience to learn, then you can use one of free content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla.

Website Pros:

• Designed to meet your expectations
• Professional looking (if you go with the right agency)
• Many have an easy content management system (which means you can edit the wording, page order etc yourself)

Website Cons:

• Original design costs can be expensive
• Any changes on design need to be made by the agency
• Websites can be less search engine friendly than blogs but you should have a SEO plan in the ready
• They are not conducive to conversations/interaction

Business Blog

A blog (a contraction of the term “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video…. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Wikipedia

It is possible to install a blog on your own, perhaps for personal use.  However if you want a more professional looking blog then either embark on some training or look for someone offering WordPress (thee ultimate blog).

I had the ‘blog versus website’ dilemma for this site and I ended up choosing a blog for a number of reasons.  I needed a site that that I could manage myself and which actively used social media tools.  More importantly the template was free and I could customise it to the Bright Social Media brand.  The bonus, of course, is that blogs are already search engine friendly.

Blogsite Pros:

• Templates are free and thousands to choose from
• Search engine friendly – plugins such as SEO make WordPress a Google fan
• Content management is extremely easy
• Engagement – people can leave comments and you can begin conversations with potential customers
• Perfect for social media integration
• Cheap – With the right training you should be able to make minor adjustments yourself

Blogsite Cons:

• You need to have some knowledge of CSS
• Somewhere in the world someone will have the same template as you
• Its a blog – you need to keep it fresh with content

Overall

Really it depends on the nature of your business.  Large corporations tend to have both…a professional looking website as well as a blogsite that allows conversations and personalisation.

For smaller companies it often makes sense to go with a blog.  They can still look professional whilst maintaining brand control.

In just a few weeks of this website launch it reached 86/100 in the Website Grader and the top 14% of all websites with Alexa!!!

Have a look around this blogsite and form your own opinion.

If you need a blogsite…get in contact!

Hats off to these guys who have taken it to their WordPress blog to the next level.  I’ve put together my top ten designs that you simply wouldn’t believe are hosted on Wordpress.

Its time to give a little inspiration and appreciation to…

Winner – Wowtoys.com

Art – deborahcavenaugh.com

Education  – waldotheworm.co.uk

Food –   Cupcakesactually.com

Digital – midiadigital.com.br

More toys – Janeladainfancia.com.br

Education – notstupid.nl

Jewellry – masatopearls.com

Music – djs-music.com

Sport – roninsnowboards.com

Which one is your favourite?

Install WordPress Plugins

You can get a lot of free plugins online and they will help a lot in optimizing your blog.

Optimize Permalinks

The default permalink is not SEO-friendly and should be changed right away. For me, the most SEO-friendly would be to use /%postname%/ which will make something like this yoursitename/yourpostname . You can change your permalink by going to Settings >> Permalinks and choose custom structure and input /%postname%/ .

Optimize Page Titles

Page titles are the most important in your single page and should be placed between h1 tags. Titles should be short but keyword-rich.

Remove Hyperlink of the Title of Your Single Posts

I saw a lot of blogs that hyperlinks the title of their single posts and this is no longer needed since it will still link on the same page. You can easily edit it at Presentation and edit the single.php file.

Validate Your Code

There are a lot of tools online that you can use to validate your code. By validating your code, it will help search engines to crawl your site easier. This requires knowledge in web design to fix these codes so if you can’t do it, you can hire a web developer to do it for you.

Add Meta Keywords and Description

Always add meta keywords and description to your blogs because it will help the search engines to identify what kind of blog you have. Choose your keywords wisely (means that you choose keywords that are not so competitive but has a good search volume).

Deep-Linking Your Posts

Deep-linking is where a post of yours links to another related post of yours. Choose the keywords to hyperlink wisely, choose the one that fits most to the post that you’ll be linking.

Reference

I am Bryan Joseph King and I’m a programmer and at the same time doing SEO and I’m here to share tips on how to optimize your site or blog. Hope these tips of mine will be a help to you and bring more traffic to your blog/site. I’m the owner of http://yourdailyguide.org/ and Your Daily Guide is a site where you can get news and information about search engine optimization, improving your WordPress blog, programming tips, and other things that are related to the internet. [tags]Content Management System, CMS, WordPress, blog, blogsite, SEO, search engine optimization, optimisation, traffic, seo friendly, traffic, page titles, google, Katrina de Gruchy, Bright Social Media,  SMM, Social Media Marketing, Twitter, Facebook, customisation, customization [/tags]