Why Your Blog Should Be on Your Website
Blogs are much more than essays on what you had for breakfast or free samples of your writing style. They are also marketing tools that will help boost an author’s online brand. So it makes sense to be aware of how your blog affects your internet marketing.
Whether it’s Google, Yahoo or Bing, the goal of a search engine is to bring back the right results from the World Wide Web for whatever is typed into the search box. No one knows for sure what the Google algorithm is for choosing which results are the most appropriate, but their tech team constantly reminds web professionals to be “relevant.”
What do they mean by “relevant?” Let’s say an internet visitor is looking for “Georgia Peaches.” There’s a website that talks about Georgia and one that talks about Peaches. Those are both sort of relevant so both sites will show up, although they’ll appear pretty far down the list. But the one that talks a lot about Georgia Peaches, has www.georgiapeaches.com as their URL and is listed in the “Online Directory of Georgia Peaches” will show up at the top because it seems to be the most relevant answer to the search.
Many authors have a website on which they post some biographical information, a list of titles and a link for buying books. But their blog is on a completely different website like blogger.com. When an internet visitor is searching for that author and Google looks for the most relevant answer to that search, the author is essentially competing against herself to be the best search result.
There’s additional competition for “most relevant” from online reviews, interviews and the like, each one claiming some level of “relevancy.” Uniting your blog with your author website helps beef up the relevancy level to make it the better answer to a search. And that’s important because your site is the one place where you are completely in charge of your marketing message.
To ensure that they have the most relevant results, search engines send “spiders” to crawl the web looking for new information to add to their knowledge base. If they’ve checked a site more than once and nothing changed in between times, the spiders won’t bother coming back right away. They figure it’s old news and probably not relevant any longer.
If your blog is on your website and you write posts regularly, it will attract the attention of those search engine spiders and bring them back to index your website more often. Also, since you will no doubt blog about yourself and your books, you are providing fresh content that underlines the fact that this is the most relevant website about you. The more relevancy “points” you can rack up, the better your site will rank in search results.
Since every author is now charged with much of their own marketing, it makes sense to approach it like a small business and work to boost your internet presence. Let blogger.com do their own marketing. You should be reaping the rewards that come with having your blog on your author website.