Blogging is important for online marketing. There is a story to tell about everything; you just need to understand how to tell the story that's both interesting to the reader and brings business to your website or to your front door.My recommendation is always to include your blog directly on your website rather than some other blogging system, like WordPress or Blogger. The reason I recommend this is because your blog will appear in search results for the keywords and topics you write about.
When someone arrives on your retail store's website, you will have a chance to transact business; if they browse through your blog, you still need to get them to click on another link before you even have a chance at making a sale.
Therefore, it's much better to have website visitors arriving at your business website than some offsite blog.
However, if you've already set up an off-site blog you might not want to go through the trouble to move it over to your business site, or maybe your business site doesn't have a blog feature. If you fall into either of these categories then each one of your individual blog posts needs to somehow lead readers back to your business site.
You "lead" readers to your business site by convincing them to click a link. Sometimes people are only interested in the brief information in a single article without wanting to know more, and sometimes they are interested in reading a lot more information. They will click those inks when they are interested. The actual text of the hyperlink is called "Anchor Text."
Years ago, the most common anchor text words were "Click Here." During the early days of the internet many people didn't understand that words written in blue and underlined were hyperlinks to other pages. You literally had to tell people where to click in order to get them to navigate around the web.
Although people are more internet savvy today, you still need to be very clear about where and why you want readers to click. You can get more clicks on a link if your topic and the anchor text are chosen carefully.
Here is an example:
Let's say you are writing a blog to describe a 3-stone engagement ring. In that blog entry you might explain that an engagement ring could have a center stone and baguettes, or it could have a center round diamond flanked by two blue sapphires. Assuming you have a blue sapphire ring in your online catalog, as you describe that engagement ring you would want to hyperlink the words "engagement ring with blue sapphires" to the product detail page for that item. Likewise, you would link the description "engagement ring with baguettes" to that item in your online catalog.
Using those phrases as the anchor text will lead the reader to expect that they will see those items if they click the link. This is a very user friendly method of hyperlinking from your blog to a product page on your website.
Those two anchor text examples both had more than 3 words. As you write your blog posts you should try to use hyperlinks with as many 3 or more word phrases as possible. This method will eventually associate a very large collection of keywords with your website.
Google likes websites that are user friendly, and those with a large variety of keywords associated with them. User friendliness and varied anchor text will help increase your ranking in search results.
