Can I have a blog?

Of course you can!

Every Run Your Own Website, has an unlimited blog or news facility included. They give your website life and they give Google and other search engines a reason to come back to you website!

What does a Blog post and a News item have in common? They are essentially the same. Each is more than one piece of information grouped together under the same category. A web page, on the other hand, can only exist in one place on a website. You would not want to keep adding another blog directly to your blog page because you would very quickly end up with a blog page several metres long!

Instead, your Blog Page (or News, Case Studies etc.) acts as a container, like a drawer in a filing cabinet. Every time you add a new blog, you put it in the front of the drawer, all the other blogs are now behind it. This is why you will always see Blogs and News sections on a website listed with the most recent post at the top, with every other one behind it. They may be displayed on a page with just the first few lines of each shown. This is called an excerpt and it will usually be followed by a link to allow you to read the rest of it. Sometimes the excerpt may only be a few words long.

A blog is forever, not just for Christmas

It is very important that you do not delete your blogs because, no matter how old they might be, Google will have read and indexed them, and they will appear in Google searches. It does not matter to you how people come across your website, the important thing is that they come across you in the first place. If you take down a blog post, Google will discover that it is no longer there and this will have a negative effect on the position of your website with Google. Google does not like directing people to a page that is no longer there as it does not reflect very well on Google either.

If you do have a good reason to take a blog or news post down, you should make sure that your sitemap is rebuilt and Google is informed right away that the blog post is no longer there. If your website has been set up correctly, this should happen automatically but it is worth checking this with your web designer. Your sitemap, by the way, is an index of all your pages, blog posts and pretty much everything else on your website. Google uses this sitemap to look up all the pages that appear on it.

Why your blog is important

Your blog or news posts are effective ways to not only keep Google and other Search Engines coming back to your website, they are also an excellent method of keeping your customers and prospective customers up to date with whatever is going in on in your business.

This is why we ensure all Run Your Own Websites, have an unlimited blog. We never want to restrict the amount of fresh content you might write and tell the world about!