Why WordPress Can Help Your Business…

This is a follow-on post for my post on the Rise of the Blog as a Business Gateway over at SEOscoop.

If you read the post and the comments you will see that Glenn over at Divinewrite raised so many good points that I realized I’d left out some important information.

More About WordPress and SEO

I can’t find any decent usability studies, but there’s a ton of information all over the web that talks about WordPress’s SEO-friendly setup. There are a couple of hitches: duplicate content is one but you can largely cut that out by disabling the content preview (excerpt) pane if your blog is set up like that, so that the whole post is featured on the front page instead of only a part of it. If you’d like more on how to make your WordPress setup more friendly, you can’t do better than The Definitive Guide to Higher Rankings for Your Blog.

The most obvious example I can think of for how successful a blog can be for business is my own. My main business website has been Wellwrittenwords since 2002.

My Blogging for Business Experiment

As late as 2006 I decided to experiment with blogging for business after seeing how blog posts were doing so well for my clients. I didn’t want this associated with my main site in case it didn’t work out, so I bought (in retrospect) a terrible domain name: marketmou.com and set up the blog as a sub-domain. Within months I had a PR of 4. Meanwhile, due to changes in Google’s algorithms, my Wellwrittenwords.com site lost page rank from 4 to 3.

Traffic rose steadily with Marketmou and despite long periods of inactivity and things not going the way I wanted, I continued to get good traffic and increased incoming links with practically no effort.

Getting my Google Page Rank Back

So a few months back I decided that I’d been torturing myself long enough. The marketmou domain name was now annoying me to the point of insanity. So after careful consideration I took the decision to cannibalize it and import the posts to my Wellwrittenwords site. I simply don’t have time to keep them both going and my main site was suffering: a stupid situation since Wellwrittenwords has the domain age that is so coveted. Yes, you get SEO points from Google just for having an aged domain.

Within weeks I had my PR of 4 back on Wellwrittenwords. When I post I am often at the top of Page 1 of Google for a search on the relevant keyphrases. To take an example from this week, please Google ‘SEO self regulation.’ It was the first time I had mentioned that phrase on my site (so the Google authority attribute was not from some previous post) and the same day, March 11, I was at the top of Page 1 on Google.

Now, if you will, take a look at my post of March 12: Failproof FaceBook Strategies for Growing Your Business. Google the phrase. Now Google FaceBook Strategies for Growing Your Business. See what I mean?

Still doubt that WordPress–or blogging–is the reason? Remember that pages on a static site take days at least to get indexed. The quickest I’ve ever hit page 1 of Google for content on a new page of a static site is a week. With my blog it’s consistently hours.

Permanent Text on Your Blog’s Front Page

As for Glenn’s point about putting a blurb on your site’s main page: there are so many ways to achieve this with a blog. You can easily modify a WordPress template to include a text box in the main content column right under the header. In fact I do it for all the blogs I work on. Sometimes it’s just to urge people to sign up for the RSS feed, but often there is other information there too. Also you can insert any text you like into the widgets in the side bar. No problem at all inserting any text you want to show up on a permanent basis. It is also possible to add a page to your blog (with some templates–not all) that is static so that the blog posts show up on a secondary page.

I don’t think the goods and services come off as an afterthought on a blog at all. Rather, you can demonstrate to your clients that you really do know about all the goods and services you’re offering. This is often reassuring to potential clients, not to mention that it gives them a chance to interact with you in an informal way before they purchase.

There I rest my case. If it’s not convincing enough I’m content. We bloggers are stealing the show–ssshhh.