A blog is an excellent forum for a small business to generate leads, connect with customers and improve search engine results. A robust archive of informative and friendly text is the basis for a good blog, but content alone isn’t necessarily enough to help put a small business over the top. There are a number of add-ons, plug-ins, and techniques that can enhance a company’s page for maximized results. These can usually be downloaded for free from a blogging platform’s website. Here are some accessories to make a business blog soar.
Contact forms
A contact form seems like a simple solution but is essential for any small business’ website. This add-on essentially gives users the opportunity to submit their names, email addresses and any comments that they’d like to make right to a company’s inbox. This streamlines the process of asking consumers to manually send the same information and is an excellent way to find out which customers would like to hear about special offers or gifts such as promotional products.
Search Engine Optimization
A blog in its own right is capable of optimizing a company’s profile by the metrics and algorithms of search engines. SEO add-ons help to go deeper into computer code so that blog authors don’t have to. Many search engines, such as Google, have highly technical methods for screening websites that involve looking for keywords in the meta data, which doesn’t show up on a web page but is embedded in its code. This type of add-on will automatically update a blog’s meta descriptions and meta keywords to reflect elements from blog post titles and the text of the blog itself.
Adsense
When measuring the success of a blog or website, Google is the accepted industry standard. As a result, conforming to Google benchmarks and looking for the data that Google screens for is helpful when trying to promote a blog. Small businesses can use Adsense plug-ins on a blog to find out a bit more about the number of people that are looking at a web page, as well as the links that led them to it. This is an excellent way to target a core audience and create better marketing techniques in order to hone traditional advertisements or create effective promotional items.
Bookmarks, sharing, emailing
Nothing generates buzz around a website or blog like the ability to share it with others. The addition of buttons that correspond to bookmarking or messaging actions will make a page’s popularity increase quickly. Readers can “like” a post on Facebook, email it to a friend, bookmark it on their computer, and tweet it on Twitter all in a matter of seconds with the right buttons installed on a blog.