We’re big believers in what a great tool WordPress is to power your small business website. WordPress doesn’t have to look like a blog, and it provides a way to manage your content and update your website effortlessly.
One of the other benefits of using WordPress for your website of course, is that you have a website and a blog all in one. And a blog is a great way to build traffic to your website.
Original Content Is The Key
Finding link directories and begging or paying for links to your site is no longer the path to great search engine results. Google is steadily devaluing this approach. Google wants to rank sites highly that have real content that is valuable for its users and advertisers, not pages with a bunch of links to other sites. And they are constantly updating their algorithm to reflect this. (Google updated their search ranking algorithms over 200 times last year.)
Regularly publishing quality articles and content to your website gives Google more content to crawl, and provides value to your web site visitors as well. For example, if you are a Chiropractor, you can publish short articles that answer common questions that prospective patients might have.
Articles topics might be “The Top 5 Ways Chiropractic Care Can Help” or “What To Expect On Your First Visit To The Chiropractor.” It’s a great way to provide value to your visitors, and help your website rank better in the search results. And if your content is good, other people will link to your site, helping you even more.
When using WordPress for your website, you can set up a static front page that doesn’t look like a blog at all, and then have a link to an “articles” area on your site, where you can publish content rich articles.
This articles area is a list of the blog posts that you create, and the content acts as “spider food” for the search engine crawlers. All you have to do is write and publish the blog post, and the article page gets updated automatically for you, and WordPress lets the crawlers know your site has been updated.
The Trend Toward Local Blogging
Local search expert Matt McGee has been talking about “hyperlocal blogging” for a long time. He recently published a success story about a photographer named Kim Koehler who started a website for her business but wasn’t getting much traffic.
She started a blog on WordPress.com and posted content and photos regularly. The blog drove thousands of visitors to her website and helped her get some new clients. Kim says: “The Internet is the new Yellow Pages.” She is one of those smart business owners who can see the shift that is happening in how customers find her business.
In this case Kim set up a free blog on WordPress.com. This is fine but she ended up with her blog on a different domain from her primary website this way. She had a special circumstance, but if you have the choice you’ll want to host your blog on your own domain.
I recommend to my clients to set up their own domain and hosting account. You can install the free version of WordPress from WordPress.org in minutes, and then you will have your combined Website and blog under your own domain name.
See Video: How To Install WordPress in Five Minutes.
I also encourage our clients to write and publish articles on their websites. In some cases, we’ve pulled out print newsletters that they have sent to their customers in the past and used that content for articles. In other cases, I’ve had them hire copywriters who would interview them over the phone for 10 minutes and write articles for them for a very reasonable price.
And when your website is set up to use WordPress, it takes minutes to post the articles, and Google finds them within a day or less. This means other people can find them too, and in turn find your website and your business.
Tell me about your experiences with this – are you a small business that is blogging? Are you getting results from it? I’d love to hear your story!
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
I am a new in blogging, and such an experience is in front of me. What I like about WordPress is that the blog looks like a website and gives you great opportunities to build llike-minded community!
Useful article, Don, and a great blog, I found you through Litemind.
regards!
Natalia, thanks for stopping by!
As you start working with WordPress and blogging (you have your site started I see) let me know what kinds of articles and videos would be useful to you and I’ll try to cover some of those topics here.
Good luck with your new website!
-Don
Your site is exactly what I was looking for. I’ve done some elementary html web sites using Dreamweaver in the past but am about to create a new one, and I’d like to try Wordpress. I’m especially interested in your article on creating a static page for the index. Have you published that article yet? Would love to see it.
Thanks in advance,
Hi John – thanks for the comment and the kind words!
I just published the first of two articles on creating a static front page for your WordPress site here: How To Make WordPress Look Like a Website
Hi,
I have been thinking about setting up WordPress, my idea was to have the website sit at http://www.firebreeze.net and the blog at http://www.firebreeze.net/blog/ or http://blog.firebreeze.net/
And then what I wanted to do was to extract the latest articles posted, and put them on my website at http://www.firebreeze.net for the search engines to crawl and for potential website visitors. How would one go about doing this?
Any help would be appreciated,
Regards,
Tahir
Hi Don,
Good article, I think I’m doing it the way you’ve recommended. I have my own domain and my own hosting, and just use the WordPress software. Having a small problem tho – wanting to drive traffic to my blog by posting comments on my friend’s blogs. But so many people use blogger, which usually requires an OpenId. I know I can get a free OpenId, but then how do I get it to point to my blog? I’m wondering if the benefit to using WordPress hosting is that then your OpenId will link to your blog?
Hope my question makes sense, any insight would be great! Thanks!
@Tahir – I get this question a lot – should I install my blog on the root or my domain or under a sub-directory like /blog?
It’s a fair question. From an SEO standpoint I don’t think it matters that much, it is more of a personal choice and depends on how you want to use it. Most of the traffic to a website comes in through deeper links on the site, not necessarily through the home page. And Google ranks pages – not sites.
For most cases, you can just set up WordPress on the root level of your domain, and then set up the home page for your blog as a static page like described in this article.
Some people like to set up a static HTML page at the root level of their domain, that links to the blog. That’s what I’ve done at Expand2Web, to separate the business side from the blog a little bit.
Either way is ok.
@Keryna – When you leave a comment on a blogger site you can set up a profile for yourself with a link back to your site.
Also, there is an OpenID plugin for WordPress self-hosted blogs too.
I don’t think hosting a your site on WordPress.com would help you with the Blogger sites. You can still “register” your self-hosted blog with WordPress.com and get an account there too. So you can still get the benefits of OpenID without hosting your blog on WordPress.com.
p.s. Nice motorcycle!
Hi Don:
I’ve been having an internal debate with myself about using WordPress as my business “website.” I was playing around with it to see how it would look (I’ve used WordPress as a blogging platform), but I can’t figure out how to make the front page static (or at least parts of it static). Does it depend on the template you choose?
@Kristie – You can make the front page static with pretty much any theme.
Here’s a step-by-step on How to Make WordPress Look Like a Website, and here’s a video Walkthrough too.
Hi, I’ve done exactly this – setting up a new business website using Wordpress. However when I started I used wordpress.COM and redirected my http://www.companyname.com address to the companyname.wordpress.com address.
I now want to host my wordpress site on my orginal http://www.companyname.com site – can I do this easily or do I have to start over with a wordpress.ORG site??
I’m quite confused! (sorry, but I don’t want to name my business here yet as it’s not yet up and running, although I do have some content live already).
@Victoria,
You should be able to go to the place where you registered your domain name and point your DNS server to the new site. Also, if you end up migrating to a self-hosted install of WordPress, you can easily migrate your content over. Here is a post on How to Move Your Site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org
Are you recommending “all in one seo” plug in for business owners using wordpress as a company website? Most of those owners are not blogging.,just using it as great CMS.
@art – Yes, I recommend installing that plugin in my WordPress Post-Install Checklist video because it’s valuable whether you are just blogging or using it for a company website.
For example, you can set individual title tags and meta descriptions on each WordPress “Page” used on your company site using this plugin.
Hi,I’d like to make a blog with a website-like homepage that has just the 1st paragraph of a story, the story is then linked to another page that has the full article and the comments section like in a blog,but I need the home page to have no comments, just like a traditional web site, can I achieve this using your methods? how would I link to another page with the full story? and can all articles appear in their own pages or will it take too much space on the server?
I love wordpress because it is so easy to install it and there are so many useful plugins as well as wonderful themes available for free download all over the internet. It truly is a wonderful platform to start blogging for non-techies. It makes our work super easy and we can focus on content development rather than worry about technical aspects of setting up a visually pleasing website.
So I think it is a perfect solution for small businesses. Though I haven’t tried other platforms like Joomla or Drupal, and they may be good too, but I am so satisfied with wordpress that I didn’t need to experiment with other platforms.
I started using wordpress for my blog. I have read your posts, very helpful by the way, and I am about to have my website built using worpress by a company. What should I request or make sure I have so its done right?