What is a blog?

The term Blog is a short form for Weblog. A blog is a website where content is posted on a regular basis in reverse chronological order.  The process of authoring a blog, maintaining it or adding content to it is refered to as blogging.  It consists of text, hypertext, images and link to other video, audio or other web content. 

Over the recent years blogging has gained popularity and is becoming and increasingly important means of communication.  Blogs are maintained on dedicated blogging hosting services or by running a blogging software on a regular hosting service. 

A blog entry typically has the following elements.

• Title
• Body
• Comments (added by readers)
• Category (optional – multiple categories possible)
• Post Date (date the post was published)
• Trackback ( this links to other sites that refer to this entry.)

The making of a Blog.

The internet allows for people from around the world to post onto a blog.  Blogs are made with Blogging software such as Drupal, Nucleus CMS and Serendipity.  When choosing a blogging software you could be looking at two important aspects.  Good Usability(Easy to navigate interface) and format flexibility.  Some web-hosting companies such as Tripod, ISPs like American Online and portals like Yahoo 360 create blog creation tools and blog hosting.  Blogs are built with various technologies ranging from Cold Fusion to Python, and J2EE to ASP.net. 

On the internet today, we find many kinds of blogs. 

• Topical – These blogs are focused around a particular topic of discussion
• Business – blogs are used to promote businesses and business-related concepts
• Moblog – posted from mobiles or PDAs
• Cultural – arts and theatre

Blogs & Business

“A corporate blog is a blog published by, or with the support of, an organization to reach that organization's goals.”

Blogs are a strategic Business communication tool.  Blogs usually rank higher in search engines, which effectively means that more traffic is directed towards your site, which in turn translates to increase sales.  For some people higher ranking in search engines is the only reason for blogging.  There are several reasons why blogs rate higher in search engines.  It is not only the magic of links.

Keywords: This is perhaps the most important reason why blogs rank higher in search engines.  A blog is a “conversation”.  Its an expression of the reader’s thoughts.  Since a naturally conversation revolves round certain keyword and phrases means blogging actually fills a search engine’s database with relevant keywords.  Relevant because most of us search for the words and phrases that we use daily.  The very same words and phrases that have filled up the engine’s database.  The outcome – higher ranking … more visitors … more business.

Title: It is common practice to use the blogs title/ headline as the page title.  That is why this place is filled with carefully selected keywords.  Of course, that is the most important place to have them, because that is where search engines are going to look to be able to understand what your page is all about.  The words found in this location are therefore ranked higher than in other parts of the code.

Modern web design templates makes extensive use of stylesheets and follow an almost tableless design architecture.  It often means cleaner code, excellent brower compatibility and good for people with disabilities.   This is all good for search engine spiders.  That means your page will be easier to find reflected in higher pages rankings and increased traffic.

Keyword density:   This is ratio of the words someone searches to the total words on a page.  This tends to be particularly high in blogs.  This is because they are tend to be short and more often than not are about one subject.  This means high keyword density and hopefully higher page rankings.

Interesting facts about Business Blogs.

Only 2 out of 10 senior business executives actually write their own personal blogs according to the results of an international poll published by www.writer4business.com today.

83% of the respondents said their blogs were written or drafted by someone else, although they approved the text before it was published. Of the 17%, who said they wrote their own blogs, most said they first asked for advice from HR and communications colleagues.

Asked why they did not write their own blogs, nearly half replied that they found it too time consuming while 39% said that they had difficulty in expressing themselves in writing.

The poll was conducted among company executives in the United States, United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia.

Additional Reading

Corporate Blogging & its Benefits.

Business Blogs provide your small business with a change to share your knowledge and expertise with a wider audience.  Most consultants see the opportunity to build a wider audience as the biggest benefit to blogging. 

All communication channels are established to deliver results.  The kind of results from corporate blogging are somewhat different.

Better Customer Relations.  In blogs, you are not there to sell.  You are there to develop a more intimate and trusting relation with your customers.  Blogs are often devoid of any corporate verbiage and lend personal opinions and perspectives, thus achieving different corporate objectives – building trust.  Not selling.

Blogs are also an extremely efficient way of colleagues to keep each other informed on progress in a large project.  This is a replacement for the otherwise lengthy reports and emails, that would be exchanged between colleagues achieving the same end.

Blogging also provides an excellent way for you to test a new idea.  Blogging is informal.  Blogging is an area where people can provide you with uninhibited feedback.  They can lend you opinions and perspectives with a greater measure of value.  You can publish your idea and wait for the results.  What to people say? Are they interested?

The future of your blog.

It generally does not take much time to figure out whether your blog is delivering results and meeting its objectives.  Does anyone comment on your blog? Have you been linked to other blogs.  Does your audience share with you feedback?  These are all factors that will help you determine whether you would like to make your blog a long term commitment.