I guess if I said “because,” that would not be enough to convince you, right!?  Ok, it was worth a try.  There are many reasons to have a blog but I’ll cover just a few of the major reasons in this post.  Please feel free to leave a comment at the end if you have any additional reasons to share!

1. Blogs are dynamic in nature and are LOVED by search engines like Google and Yahoo!.  Assuming that you’re keeping to a regular editorial schedule, there will regularly be new content.  And the search engines love new content.  As a result, blogs tend to be indexed far more often than websites.  And when you depend on internet search results to fill part of your marketing pipeline, this is a very important reason!
2. Blogs enable “2 way communication” with your audience.  Unlike static websites and print media, as an example, blogs provide a platform for you to interact with your visitors through the comments feature that every blog contains (unless it’s been disabled!  Tip: Don’t disable comments!).
3. Blogs can help you to build your personal brand as well as the brand and culture of your company!  Unlike static websites that are often very “scripted” (you know what I mean … “About Us” … “Services” … “Portfolio” … etc.), blogs are much more free-flowing and give you the ability to wonder from topic to topic, expressing your views, offering how-to’s and advice and interacting with your readers.  Throughout the process, your personality and the culture of your company show through.  All good things!
4. Blogs are cheap and super easy to set up!  No joke – you can set up a blog for you or your company in about 5 minutes, totally for free!  A few platforms that you might review are Wordpress, Typepad and Blogger.  If you’re interested in having more control over the look and feel of your blog as well as getting access to “advanced” features, you might consider a paid subscription.  But that’s not really necessary!  Of course, you always have the option of hiring a professional designer like MDesign Media to create a custom blog for you.  We can even integrate your blog into your website in many cases, just like we did for one of our partners, Visual Alliance Media!

So those are some of the reasons that you should consider starting a blog for yourself or your company if you haven’t already.  And if we can do anything to help you with the process, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

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Why is this important? According to comScore’s Press Release on the December 2009 U.S. Search Engine Rankings, the following is an indication of how much traffic is on the search engines:

“In the December analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with more than 14.0 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.6 billion searches. Bing experienced large growth during the month with a 6-percent increase in query volume to nearly 1.4 billion searches.”

Now, let’s talk about why local search matters to you:

According to The Kelsey Group, a Princeton, NJ based Research Company:
70% of U.S. households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services.

Also, the Nielsen/Net Ratings reports that 24.4% of all searches are local.

Want to get your business noticed in this tidal wave of traffic in the local search space? Give us a ring at 813.495.7070 or drop us an email so we can chat.

Optimized Local Search Directory Listings $595
We will create an optimized listing to include title and description on the following:

• maps.google.com
• Bing.com
• local.yahoo.com
• yelp.com
• local.com
• localeze.com

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If you are someone who is looking to put your business online, you will soon learn that without search engine optimization, you will soon be sunk!  When you consider that an enormous percentage of sales made on the internet are directly preceded by the use of a search engine, you will soon see why it is so important to make sure that these devices work for you, and not against you.  You’ll find that if you can make sure that your web pages are constantly linked first on the search engines’ results, you will have better sales, more relevant page views and better business all around.

When you are considering good SEO practices, you will want to make sure that you have titles and the correct meta tags to your webpages.   While this will involve more work, you will also see that it does a lot of good in the long run.  You are making yourself more searchable, and over time, you will see that there is a lot to be said for making yourself obvious to the searchers who are looking for you.  This is integral to your website’s success.

You will also discover over time that if you are not on the first page of search results on a search engine, about 62% of the searchers will not find you.  This is an enormous chunk of business that you are losing, and you’ll find that these are viewers that you sorely need.  They are looking for your product, it’s just that they can’t find it, and when you look into SEO methods, you are looking into helping them find you. 

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