Blogs vs. Websites

The "Web World" is changing faster than most of us can imagine.

10 years ago, you were cutting edge if you had a website for your company. And you may have spent $10,000 to someone who built it for you.

Blogs were also cutting edge 10 years ago. According to Wikipedia, Blogger launched in 1999 and was acquired by Google in 2003 and by 2006, Blogger was fully integrated as a Google Service and most of the main features that are available today were included.

Google has continued to improve Blogger and there are plenty of additional features you can add and explore.

Recent thinking is that a blog is a website, which if true I would say a blog is better than a traditional website if:

• You want to be found online.
• You want to keep customers up to date on your business or industry.
• You want to use the web as a communication tool.

The time and expense of redesigning a traditional website, is prohibitive for most small businesses even though the cost has gone down, it may not be the best way to be found online.

There is an industry built around the term SEO.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization.

Traditional thinking has been that people would type in a few words into a search engine, like Google, or Yahoo! and the SEO people's job was to make sure your website appeared in the top 10 results, meaning you would appear on the first page.

A couple things have happened to change the traditional thinking.

• Search Engines have changed and refined what it takes to get noticed and get in the top results. They are doing this for the end user, the person doing the search, not the businesses that are trying to be found. So the website you had designed 3 years ago may not be getting the results it used to.
• People are using Search Engines differently than the did a few years ago. We are typing in more words to refine what we are looking for. For example I can now type in "Movies 46805" and Google will show me links to all the movie theaters and showtimes for today.

As a nod to my friends who are in the SEO business, it is still important, but I have found that with a blog, I didn't need to be as concerned with that compared to a traditional website. I do use certain SEO principles with my blogs, which I'll talk about in the future.

Finally today, I know that some companies have included a blog built into their traditional website. I honestly don't know if this as effective as having a separate blog. Tomorrow, I'll show you a couple of sites that I created so you can compare.