Lost in the blog world
-
I want to start a blog, but honestly I have no idea where to start as I've got so many questions so I hope someone can help me out.
I have a Magento e-commerce website so I've got the possibility to integrate the WP extension. Would that be a good idea or is it better to have a separate blog and separate server?
Which blog platform is considered to be the best and what are the main differences between the big blog platforms?
Should I use my business (domain) name for my blog or have a separate (domain) name?
How often are you 'supposed' to blog per week/month to build a strong blog?
Many thanks in advance!
-
Better setup your blog on same domain.
Example
http://www.bridalhotspot.co.uk - Magento
http://www.bridalhotspot.co.uk/blog/ - Wordpress
Updates on blog - new post every 2-3 days. For your market it not hard because you can post news not only about your own clothing but about celebrity wedding etc.
-
Amazing insight, Kenyon!
I could visualise everything while reading your response and you have answered all my questions. Thanks for taking the time to reply, really appreciated! -
Thanks Paul, that is some great information, especially the test period
I'm in the bridal business so there is tons of stuff to blog about and I'm planning to get my Facebook followers (over 11.000) involved as well by asking them in what topics they would be interested as that might bring some ideas that I wouldn't have thought about.
I understand your reply about the best platform, I guess that I will just have to do some research to see which platform would suit me and my company best.
Many thanks for your reply!
-
-Wordpress is hands down the most powerful and easiest to use blogging platform. It's open source and the developers involved is immense and it's still easy to use. Almost as easy as setting up a social media profile, maintenance is simple with the plugins available too.
-Magento on the other hand is one of highest regarded E-commerce platform and it is not known for it's blogging capabilities. Hence the WP plugin.
So really it comes down to your main purpose and where you will spend the most time. If it's blogging go with wordpress and add a e-commerce plugin. If your main purpose and demand on time will be E-commerce (updating and adding products, changing inventory) Then stick with Magento and use the wp plugin.
For your name I would suggest using your business name and or any keywords you want to rank for. (do keyword research!) Bing is still big on EMD's (exact match domains) which means you will get a pretty good seo advantage by naming it what your main keyword will be. Google does also but has recently lowered EMD's ranking influence.
You can also just have the blog be an inline part of your site. It would be a page on your site and still be on your server and would appear like this www.syls.com/blog. That would be best if you want external and internal links pointing to certain products to help there rankings. You could also use a subdomain like blog.syls.com which would put you on different server. This would allow you to link to your products and they would be considered external. Google is smart and will figure out the relation pretty quick so having 100 links pointing to your main page isn't going to do the trick.
Most likely an inline blog on the same server would be best for you. If any of your blog content gets linked to that way your site will get some link juice. The more you blog the better off you will be. That being said it needs to be good content google will penalize your for publishing crap content (scraping, duplicate or keyword stuffed crap). That being said you can always use a platform like content.ly to outsource making good relevant content and then make what you can in addition when you have time. Start out small learn your niche make some content and get better, google will take notice eventually and if you do a good job and become more relevant your rankings will improve.
-
As long as the blog is directly related to the content of your ecommerce site, you absolutely want it to be part of the main site, Sylvana, (e.g. mywebsite.com/myblog) not on another server and not with a separate domain name.
There are plenty of different blog platforms. Asking which one is best is like asking "what's the best car?" It depends on many factors. Sorry that sounds like a cop-out, but it's true.
In general, for a straightforward blog, WordPress is terrific. It has the considerable advantage of being so widely used that there are a huge number of resources out there to help new users get up to speed.
For a strong blog, you should post when you have something worthwhile to say. Posting fluff just to keep to a schedule is pointless and will hurt your reputation in the long run. That said, if you don't have the resources to come up with and post something worthwhile at least twice a week, you'll struggle to get good value from your blog. That's a somewhat arbitrary number, but it points up the fact that posting once or twice a month doesn't create a blog of much use to visitors, and therefore not much value in the eyes of search engines.
Wonder if a blog's really for you? Designate a 4 or 5 week period and write 2 or 3 blog posts a week - even though you have no blog to post them on. If you can do that consistently for a month and enjoy it, you can probably sustain a blog. Plus you'll have a great stockpile of posts with which to get started, or to keep in reserve for one of those weeks when you're too busy to write something new.
Hope that gives ya some food for thought?
Paul
P.S Have no experience with the Magento WordPress integration, so hopefully someone with direct experience with that combo can weigh in here too.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I have an integrated blog on my website, but should I have another blog elsewhere? Like Blogger? Tumblr?
Is it a good or bad idea to have other blogs, for the same company??
Content Development | | Coppell0 -
Finding blog ideas and syndication
We've had our blog for a little under 2 years now using Magento and we've only created 48 posts. As we're in the furniture industry topics are hard to come by and we've become stuck for ideas. Sure we have researched our audience, checked Q&A's and forums to analyse what questions our audience are asking, but the ideas are limited. It's a difficult industry to find niche articles that our audience would be interested in. Could anyone suggest any ideas on how we could find interesting topics that people would actually want to share and maybe our industry influencers would be interested in featuring on their sites, does syndication still work? Duplicate content is a big 'NO NO' for Google but as long as the third party site features a rel=canonical or link back to our original post, Google wouldn't have any problem with this?
Content Development | | Jseddon920 -
Any help on best practices to move blog domain?
Hi, I am going to move my blog hosted on wordpress.com to a folder under mysite.com. (e.g. mysite.com/blog/). I start to think after the blog has gone live there will be duplicated content issue because I am going to import my posts in last 2 years onto the new location. I what way can I avoid that happen? Can I set something up (e.g. 301 redirect) in my current wordpress.com account? Any advice. Please help! Thanks
Content Development | | LauraHT0 -
My Blog needs more hits
Hi I am trying to find a site which can help drive more traffic to my blog. At the moment I am only getting traffic from social media (namely twitter) but all other sources are failing me. Does anyone recommend a good site to either help with traffic or is able to ping out posts regularly. (even old ones.) my site http://www.cocoonfxmedia.co.uk/Blog
Content Development | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Wordpress blog, transferring .com to .org
For many years now we've had a wordpress.com blog, and accumulated a lot of links from it as a result. We now have a wordpress.org blog and are keen to move all the old posts on to the new .org site. How can this be done without losing the links from the old .com blog? Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | copywritingbuzz0 -
Blog Redirect
We have a blog hosted directly on WordPress with a PR of 3. At this point we are moving this blog to our server and incorporating it into our website. I wanted to ask the experts how to go about moving this blog without loosing Page Rank. Is it possible to do a 301 redirect from WP itself? Is there anything that I can do to preserve ranking? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you Dmitry
Content Development | | DmitryP0 -
Blogs: Hosted vs. Off-Site
What is the latest opinion on whether to have a blog hosting on your primary domain or on an outside domain (either Wordpress or just another URL). In the past we have done the former and it's been a great source of fresh content and organic traffic. Wonder if there is good argument now for not having it on the domain. With this new site we're working on it logistically would be more challenging given their tech resources, plus they already have thousands of pages.
Content Development | | BMGSEO0 -
Blog content practices for e-commerce sites
What is the best practice in regards to content for e-commerce blogs on the same domain as the web-store (blog.storename.com)? What balance of content should be on the blog vs. the item & section pages or doesn't it matter?
Content Development | | MEldridge0