googlicious [goo-guhl-lish-us]  -adjective 1. describes a website that is appealing to the on-line search engine Google, therefore achieving a higher page rank;  2. describes a website whose Google search listing description is appealing to its users which results in a higher click-through ratio

Last week we looked at how a blog can be beneficial to promoting your business. To re-cap a few of the major benefits, a blog can help you become more personable and more approachable as well as help you be viewed as an authority in your industry or market. A blog can also help you get information to your customers, prospects and followers immediately, build brand and business awareness and help you gain insight to what is in your customer’s head.

This week, we will look at how implementing a blog can be a huge benefit to your business’ website. Adding a blog to your website is like giving it a shot of steroids or WGH – “website growth hormone!”

In general, the biggest difference between a website and a blog is that a website typically is much more static than a blog. In other words, the content of a website remains largely unchanged for longer periods of time, where a blog’s content is quickly and easily changed as frequently as you need or desire. It is the consistent content feeding that helps your website become more Googlicious!

I don’t want to get too much into SEO (search engine optimization) in this article as there are many, many ways to optimize your website to achieve higher and higher page rankings in the search engines. The only optimization I want to look at is as it relates to the benefits of your website having a blog.

Starting off, I mentioned last week that I thought Blogger was a more user friendly blogging tool in that the drag and drop functionality is easy to use, change, update and publish. However, there are two major drawbacks. The first is that a Blogger blog does not share your website’s domain name. The blog address will typically look something like this: yoursitename.blogspot.com. The second drawback is Blogger typically functions outside of your website and your site’s server.

The blogging tool that avoids these drawbacks is WordPress (www.wordpress.com). Although it is a little more rigid, it plugs right into your existing site and shares your site’s domain name where it would look something like this: yoursitename.com/blog. The major benefit to this is how and how often the search engines will now crawl your website.

Alright, let’s bring it back in a little bit. Let’s assume you have a modest website built with maybe 6-10 pages where most of the content on each page is pretty descriptive but doesn’t change too often. The search engine “robots” are continuously out there crawling around the web looking for new, fresh content. Since your website is pretty static, the robots won’t crawl it very often. This lack of activity negatively affects your site’s page ranking – or at least it doesn’t help it any.

Now let’s assume you add your WordPress blog as a plug-in to your website and it shares the same domain name.  Let’s also say you post a couple articles, thoughts, ideas, tutorials etc. per week. Now when that robot is out there crawling around, it is finding your fresh content from your blog, and since your blog and website share the same name, your site’s ability to climb the page ranks in the search engines increases exponentially.

One very important thing to keep in mind pertains to the content you are adding to your blog. The articles, thoughts, ideas and other entries you post should be of high value and be relevant to the content of your website. The same pertains to any links that you provide in your blog entries as well. Don’t ask me how, but those robots are pretty slick at detecting genuine posts.

With that said, let’s call it good right here with this article, otherwise we will get away from the primary focus of why you should really consider adding a blog to your website – to increase traffic, sales and profits! If you have questions relating to this article, feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail. And as always, thank you for stopping by!