Six steps to Customizing Your Blog

Writing insightful blog posts is one of the most important things to do with a business blog.  Design and implementation of your blog is key to whether your customized business blog can build inbound links that carry weight with the search engines. The right plugins help you get discovered on Google, while a messy design turns off visitors who could have become customers.

Customized Business Blog1. Install some top blog plugins- a business blog should focus on search engine optimization (SEO), making the blog load faster, and making it easy for others to share blog posts via email, Twitter and other social networks. This includes installing and updating an XML sitemap for the blog.

2. Integrate social media links and buttons- Do integrate Facebook and Twitter on your customized business blog. It’s standard practice and helps drive new visitors to your blog.  Social media buttons make it easy for customers to tweet out your work, while adding links to the company's social networks accounts help their numbers and improves their ranking in search.

3. Focus on simple designs, not bells and whistles- focus of a blog should be on the content, not on flashy designs.  Keep it simple for visitors to become customers.

4. Your Blog is also a chance to show off the human element of the business and to be creative- Using standard templates will not impress your readers. Finding the right balance in a customized business blog requires understanding that its purpose is to help the business get recognized as an authority in its industry, provide interesting and informative content and build valuable inbound links to the main site.

5. Have your blog on your own web domain- An internal blog at www.blog.companyurl.com is an acceptable practice.  However, a customized business blog set up separately on its own domain is preferred when using the business blog as an inbound linking tool.  The search engines look at the company site and the blog site as two separate entities this way.  Creating anchor links with keyword phrases in the blog that link back to the main site count as a vote of link popularity between two different sites, thus carrying much more link juice!  Simple blogging software does not do as good a job in managing content as a true CMS (Content Management System) software platform.

6. Don’t hide your “about” information- Assume your average reader hasn't heard about your business. If you have that in mind, you want to be sure they can quickly find out more about you. Have a paragraph at the top or on the side describing the business or use an 'About' page that's easy to get to.

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