Site owners have many options for the way they choose to communicate with the world. Aside from the main content of your site, you can choose to go out and participate in a social media campaign, host an e-mag or be a guest writer for industry publications. The option that the vast majority of site owners are going for is blogging.
A competitor for the humble blog is micro-blogging site Twitter. While a blog takes a fair amount of maintenance to keep up, making regular posts on Twitter can be done via a mobile phone in an idle moment. There are advantages to either option.
The advantages of blogging
Blogging has become the It thing to do for business, as it is a very handy way to add informative content to a website on a regular basis. Blogs also have the possibility of developing a loyal audience, meaning return visitors to the website. Here are some of the advantages of a blog:
*Fresh content for your pages. Any search engine optimisation expert will tell you that good SEO involves regular fresh content. Blogs are great for this, and you can discuss this with us at www.searchengineoptimisation.com.
*Topical content. A well-planned blog can help you get to the top of the SERPs by providing relevant, quality text.
*Feedback. Blogs tend to attract a community. The feedback you get can assist with the ongoing development of your site.
Some disadvantages exist for blogging, however. Blogs aren’t necessarily site-based. Some blogging software stems from a central site, meaning you don’t get the advantage of SEO content for your own pages. It’s important to host your blog, and only farm out old posts to avoid duplicate content issues. The need for constant content is also a pressure.
The advantages of Twitter
There are numerous advantages to mounting a campaign on Twitter, but there are disadvantages as well. Many businesses have been adding a Twitter campaign to their SEO plan as part of their off-page search engine optimisation. The success of these campaigns largely depends on the type of business they run and the amount of time they can devote to the campaign. Here are some of the possible benefits:
*Twitter has an inbuilt audience. It can be hard to develop a following for your blog. One advantage of Twitter is the captive audience, and social structure.
*Twitter is the big thing. While blogs have been around for a while, it seems everyone’s just started tweeting. It almost seems as though you’re missing out if you’re not tweeting.
*Twitter is brief. This comes with a drawback. Twitter may sound like an easy option for those who don’t look forward to lengthy blog-writing sessions, but it’s not. Twitter users tend to expect more regular posts, and several updates a day is the norm.
There’s no reason to choose absolutely between tweeting and publishing a regular blog. It’s possible to have the best of both worlds, with snippets from your blog featured on Twitter.
