Mar 5, 2009

E-Commerce Site Design: Setting Up Blogs for BusinessBy Helen BradleyEcommerce-Guide.com

If you haven’t added a blog to your online store, given the state of the economy, now is a good time to consider doing so, as they can be an affordable way to market your e-commerce site.

For some Web shop owners, it is the perfect forum for offering insider tips and sharing your expertise, while for others, it’s a great way to involve customers in the buying experience by either discussing products or topics pertinent to your business or by simply keeping them updated on company news in a more personal way.

To help you decide if blogging will add value to your online store I’ll explain what blogs are, how to integrate one into your site and explain what a blog can do to help you build your brand.

A blog is different from a traditional Web site in that it is more like an online diary where the blog owner posts short messages on a semi-regular basis. These blog posts are organized chronologically with the most recent post at the top so a visitor can browse down the page to read earlier posts.

This chronological layout is very different to the hierarchical layout use for most online stores. While it makes for easy reading, it isn’t optimized for finding things quickly so you wouldn’t use a blog to sell product, for example. What you will use a blog for is to stay in contact with your customers and to communicate with them about your business and products. Immediate Indexing

Unlike most Web sites, blogs are indexed regularly by search engines like Google. So, the text and images you post to your blog will be indexed within days and will appear in search engine results more quickly than changes to your Web site. By posting details of new products and any changes you make to your store to your blog and adding links back to your e-commerce site, you can feed customers to new Web site content well before the new content has been indexed.

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