A blog is a web page that shows articles in reverse chronological order, from newest to oldest, automatically. You write a post, and the post goes to the page and pops up at the top.
We have actually seen web pages that might be called faux blogs. The owners went in with Dreamweaver and wrote new things at the top of a page so it looked like a blog. Is that a blog? From the viewpoint of visitors’ experience, it could well be. From the point of view of technology, it isn’t.
But we also know that some folks think a blog is a personal journal, probably about cats. If they’re posting important news articles, they don’t think they have a blog. A colleague of ours — who absolutely knows what a blog is in technical terms — recently said that he thinks it’s a blog if it’s opinion and articles if it’s more serious.
We want to suggest that “blog” is an important technical term, regardless of the type of content you’re publishing.
How WordPress blogs work
To write a blog post, you go to New Post and write something. In the Reading Settings, you tell your website which page you want to send your posts to. That becomes your blog page.
In this example, it’s called “Blog.” But it could be “News,” “Knowledgebase,” “Ask Dr. Pat,” or “Learn.” No matter what you call the page or what role it has at your website, your posts will go to that page.
If you choose “Your latest posts,” by the way, the posts will go to your homepage. That usually means that your website is a blog.
The posts page
Go to the edit screen of the “blog” page at the site shown above and you will see that there is no content on that page. There is in fact a warning message telling you not to edit that page. Adding content to your blog page is not usually a good idea. This is a page that pulls in the most recent posts. It automatically shows all the posts you publish. That’s its job.
Wait, there’s more!
You can have lots of posts pages. You can use tags and categories to send your posts to different places. In the example below, we send different categories of posts to different pages.
You can use this method to make portfolio pages, events pages, product pages, and more. You might not think of these things as blogs at all, but that is the mechanism involved.
The value of a blog
Whether you’re posting heavy academic articles, property listings, how-to info, or philosophical musings on cats, adding fresh original content to your website on a regular basis is the single most important thing to do for your website’s SEO.
If you feel like blogs are old fashioned or unprofessional, don’t call your blog “Blog.” WordPress tells us that more than 409 million people visit WordPress.com each month, reading more than 20 billion pages each month. That’s just at WordPress.com, so it probably doesn’t include your company blog. Are you ready to ignore an audience that large just because you don’t like the word?
In-house blogging is rarely as effective or as cost-effective as hiring a professional writer. We recommend choosing professional SEO writers to produce content for your website on a regular basis. If you need this kind of help, fill out the simple form below and we will be in touch within 24 hours.
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