Search engines love regular fresh content and links to a website, the more you have of both the better your website will rank in search results and your website visitors will have more reason to visit your website regularly to see what’s new. So a blog function on your website is a great solution to achieve this.
If you need more convincing then see this article on Hubspot called “SEO is Evolving Fast – Is Your Website?” – it discusses Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and includes how a blog can now help a small business website to achieve better rankings than a larger/less flexible competitor website. Another great article on this topic is “6 Reasons Every Small Business Should be Blogging…Are You Missing the Boat?”
For tourism operators or organisations a blog is a great way to promote any news, media releases, tips for travellers coming to your area, events and activities – anything that is relevant to your business, specialist knowledge and tourism in your area. It doesn’t have to be about opinionated articles and topical issues. Once you get the hang of it adding new articles is easy and fun.
Another great thing about blog articles and RSS Feeds (all blogs have an automated RSS feed) are that they are very easy to share online adding significant opportunity for you to increase the number of inbound links to your website, which identifies it as a popular or important site by search engines. You can also list your blog URL with a large number of online blog directories, see this list for starters.
When setting up a blog, to ensure you get the best benefits for search engine rankings, make sure the blog software allows the following:
- The blog can be “self hosted” with your website domain rather than a separate domain e.g. the blog URL is: www.ABCTours.co.nz/blog. This takes a bit more effort to set up than just using a free blog hosted site and you will need your web designer to get it set up for you – but it’s worth it as all the website traffic to your blog will be credited to your main website ranking which is ultimately where you want the traffic and recognition to be achieved.
- Each blog post title can be set as part of the URL name so that keywords are included, for example this article URL is:
- Each blog post can have meta tags applied (see this article “Using Meta Tags to Get Your Website Ranking Higher in Google“)
- It has a blog plugin to easily share your content online via social media websites or email.
- You can easily set up a blog email subscriber function to build an email database and send out articles as they are published.
If you were to ask my opinion on what blog software to use to achieve all of this (and more) then I would always say WordPress.org (self hosted) wins hands down, but what you use may depend on what website content management system you have, so talk to your web designer.
Got any examples of good tourism websites with blogs? Here’s a couple I’ve spotted recently: Sky Dive Wanaka, Dive! Tutukaka
