Why do you need a company blog? Isn’t blogging just for professional writers or angst-filled teenagers?  Hardly.  Here are four quality reasons that your company should have a blog.

1. Search Engine Ranking – Search engines love blogs.  Why?
   1. Sitemaps – A sitemap is a file which helps search engines locate URLs available for crawling.  Most popular blogging software have a feature that does this automatically.
   2. Pings – In terms of blogging, a ping is an automatic online notification that new content has been posted to a blog.  This ping is often sent to web services like Technorati, Google, and others to notify them that the blog is updated and should be indexed.
   3. Categories/Tags – Blog posts are often associated with categories and tags in order to group similar topics together.  Effective categorizing and tagging will many times result in both better search engine rankings as well as more pageviews per visitor because of it’s similar content.
   4. Fresh Content – Search engines love fresh content.  An active website with regularly updated information will be indexed more frequently and likely be considered as more relevant in the longer term.
2. Customer Confidence – Visitors need a reason to trust your company as well as your services/products.  A blog can be used to convey knowledge, expertise, and professionalism.  The better a potential customer trusts a company, the more confident they will be in making a purchase.
3. Social Networking – Sites like MySpace and Facebook are typically considered to define “Social Networking”.  While that is true in many ways, social networking is much more broad.  Through a blog, a company can post information about their business, their product, or their industry and open it for conversation through comments.  This back-and-forth on a common topic is great for generating new product ideas, improving existing services, providing support, and more.
4. Cost Effectiveness – To be able to create new, fresh content without a blogging or CMS platform can become costly.  To produce content like a blog, tens or hundreds of individual pages would need to be created individually by a web designer.  By using a blog, a company can save money in the longer term.

Let Blue Ember Design educate you on the details of blogging and get you started with your own custom blog design.