Why Your E-commerce Website Needs a Blog

Whether you're a beginner in running your own website to sell products, or a master of the SEO arts, you can boost your traffic and your sales using a blog. Trust me; this works. We actually use it all the time to give our sites a boost.

Why a blog?

1. Search engines believe that content is king. What better place for fresh content than a blog? Put a few links from your blog to your e-commerce website. Google will rank those links fairly highly since the content on the blog is fresh and related to your website.

2. Blogs can be a big part of your linking strategy. If you get links to your blog, it will build the reputation of your blog with Google, who will then in turn pass on some of that rank to your website.

3. E-commerce websites have very little extrinsic search engine value. Sure you can work on your on page elements (keyword density, url optimization, h1 tags, etc), but it's very hard to develop an external (linking) strategy. This actually makes it very easy to beat out your competition. Even if your internal SEO is not quite as good as a competitor, you can beat them fairly easily with content.

What should I blog about?

You can write about anything related to your website. If you sell rims, write about different finishes or fits. If you sell clothes, write about your niche's latest news. You can even take the easy way out and just find content written by others and summarize it on your blog (giving credit to the original author, of course).

How do I set up a blog?

For those of you who have never touched PHP before, I recommend Blogspot (now owned by google). If you can handle installing a script (it's very easy I promise) onto your own host, definitely go with Wordpress. I actually never would have set up my blog here had I known how much cooler wordpress is.

Ok, I have a blog. Now what?

I'm going to be posting an article in the next few minutes as a followup to this in our Learning Center titled "Social Bookmarking, a Blogger's best friend." We used to go through so much arduous work to promote a blog and build traffic to it. That is, until we joined the web 2.0 revolution and realized how easy it is to build a following through social bookmarking. Visit the Learning Center to learn more!