Seven Reasons Why You Need A Website AND a Blog

In creating a successful online business, your goal should be a site with a great deal of content that will draw fresh, targeted daily visitors through free search engine traffic.

This is the basis of Ken Evoy’s ‘Site Build It’ program, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of high traffic websites based on this model.

On the other hand, you have the bloggers. They stick to their model of running a blog, which is actually a website from the perspective of both search engines and most visitors. Blogs are typically updated more often than websites and are more time-oriented – meaning they write about something that is happening right now in their industry or field of interest.

I have found that using both, a large content website and a blog, is a great combination and others have also recommended this approach.

Using examples from my main tennis site and tennis blog, we will now look at seven reasons why you need to have a website AND a blog. (I suggest you open both sites in tabs and then come back to check my advice)

1. Links to your main site from your blog. Links are the key to higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). Getting quality, relevant links with the anchor text of your choosing is not easy. Your blog allows you to create a link from any page of your blog to any page of your site using your chosen anchor text.

Examples:

a)    I can link from the homepage of my pagerank 4 blog to the main Tier2 pages of my main site and thus add a lot of link power to these T2 pages. This of course helps immensely with respective T2 page rankings in SERPs. Check the links in the sidebar pointing to Tennis Tips, Tennis Instruction, and other T2 pages.

b)    I can also link from individual posts to other pages of my main site using a variety of anchor texts to boost my sites rankings with keyword variations and more pagerank: Knee bend and racquet drop when serving

2. Quality 3- or 4-way link exchanges. A blog with a good pagerank gives me the power to negotiate very good link exchanges. The visible pagerank is still the main concern for many webmasters when you negotiate a link exchange.

Example:

Check the sidebar of my tennis blog again and you’ll see that I link to the ‘Fuzzy Yellow Balls’ website in my Tennis Blogs section. I am giving them a pagerank 4 homepage link and, in return, the ‘Fuzzy Balls’ site links to my ‘TennisMindGame’ site from their homepage.

I also provide them with a testimonial so that my link is not in the footer or somewhere else where it could be mistaken for a bought link and the Fuzzy Balls site could be penalized for that, which would make the link to my main site worthless.

3. Reciprocal links with other blogs for higher pagerank and traffic. Bloggers are typically very aware of the distinction between a blog and website and don’t want to “mess” with websites. They are much happier to have a “peer”, a fellow blogger, ask them for a link exchange and will be much more willing to agree.

Example:

Head back to the Tennis Blogs section in the sidebar of my blog and check the tennis blogs I link to. Then see if those blogs also link back! This helps me to increase the pagerank of my blog, which I can then direct to my main site to increase its SERPs.

4. The blog allows you to answer questions and create more interesting content. Your main website should be based on keyword research in your niche area. That means that most pages on your site are optimized for certain keywords that visitors frequently use on search engines such as Google.

Typical keywords in my tennis niche are tennis tips, how to play tennis, tennis lessons, tennis instruction, mental tennis, and so on.

Once you get some traffic to your main site, you’ll also start receiving questions through your contact form. Answering these questions almost never results in a keyword-focused page, although it is beneficial to the visitor(s), since it solves a problem.

Example:

Check the posts in the Tennis Parents category. Almost all of these posts are questions and answers and are, hopefully, useful to parents of tennis kids.

5. A blog is very quickly indexed by Google and you can get short bursts of traffic when you optimize a post about a current event. Google knows that most blogs write about current events so it indexes accordingly and pushes them higher in SERPs when they are optimized for the right words.

Example:

I wrote a post about Rafael Nadal beating Federer in the Wimbledon final. As a result; I got over 800 visitors in one day. This was because many people were searching for information about Rafael Nadal and Google placed my post in the top 5 SERP for a few days.

6. Blogs can be listed in Blog directories and sites that list top blogs. This again helps to increase the link popularity. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to get those links with a typical static content site.

Example:

My tennis blog is listed in alltop.com or, more specifically, on this pagerank 5 tennis related page: http://tennis.alltop.com/

7. Blogs allows users to post comments. This adds interest and interaction to the users site visit. Of course, they also build additional content related to the main topic of the post. Once a person has commented on a blog, it is very likely that they will return and check other visitor’s opinions and, eventually, become a regular reader and commenter.

Example:

Check the comments on this interesting post about Sampras vs. Federer…

Before you rush off to start your new blog, here are a few additional words of advice.

It will take some time to build good link popularity. Your blog won’t rank anywhere at first, so you’ll be writing many posts and getting about seven visitors per day. Also, ensure that you have enough interesting content to enable you to update your blog at least once a week.

If you feel that you have content that doesn’t really fit into your keyword-focused static site, and you have some extra time to hunt blog links, then consider starting a blog.

The website/ blog combo will give you an edge in your niche market and will help you to become an even greater authority on your chosen topic.