There are lots of different reasons for starting a blog. But I will assume that you started yours: to drive traffic to your main website and to help with being found on Google. In this scenario integrating your blog with your main business website is absolutely the best way to go.
The key to a successful website is simplicity – everything needs to be really really easy to find and use. Place hurdles (no matter how small) in the way and you will lose visitors. So if you are writing 3 blogs a week, promoting your blog via twitter/facebook and eagerly checking your blog visitors stats – please please please consider integrating your blog with your main website. By this I mean that the main website menu should remain on all your blog pages.
Examples of blogs with an integrated main website menu
The alternative I often see are blogs with “click here to visit the website” links from the blog. The Integrated websites/blogs solution is superior for the following reasons:
- Simplicity. Your blog visitors will be just a single click away from all your important top level website pages: services, offers, contact, about us and main website information. The rule of thumb is that less clicks is better.
- Visibility. Your main website menu will be very easy to spot. No matter where you place a “visit website” link (or even a fancy graphic) people can and will miss it.
- Usability. Information is much easier for your visitors to find if people know that it is available. Why hide the most important links on your website?
- Engaging. You will be encouraging people to move more freely back and forth from the blog and website.
- Motivation. The “visit website”option is hardly motivating is it? Including a keyword rich menu is more likely to catch the attention of the visitor.
- On-site SEO. The website menu will naturally include keywords, including them on your blog pages will help with your on site SEO.
- Funnelling traffic. Using the “visit website” option is a massive wasted opportunity for potentially the largest source of inbound traffic to your website. The clicks won’t help towards your SEO unless they include keywords (like your menu).
- Consistency. One of the first lessons in user interface design is that consistency is key. If you visit a website and click on the blog link – you do not expect to be whisked away to a new website, pop up window or for the main menu to move/change/disappear. Integrating your main website menu is far less confusing.
To summarise: integrating your website with your blog will result in more visitors to your website.
Of course there will always be exceptions to this general rule. I am a big advocate of using the right solution for the job (and every business and on-line marketing campaign is different). But if you run a small business and want to use your blog to drive traffic to your main business website – I can’t think of a better way to set up the blog. Can you?
Integrating your blog does not have to be expensive. If you already have a website (with a design that you like) and hosting that can support a blog then this can usually be achieved by an experienced web developer in just a few hours.
