How do you use your Blog to promote your website

I am wondering how do you get your blog to promote your website? Say you have a new website coming out and you have a section dedicated to a blog, how do you get them to come from your blog to your website? Do you keep the articles you write in the blog on the main website too ? do you provide links from the blog to specific places on the website ? Im trying to figure it out

I have a blog on one of my websites and try to post to it every day (I usually have about five posts per week). Since my goal is to have my site viewed as an authority in it's field, and I read a lot about that field, I decided to blog the news with a bit of my own commentary.

So, I started blogging the news using Blogger and had the posts published to a folder on my own domain such as EGOLsDomain.com/news/. After I made my first post I set-up a site wide link into the blog in my persistent navigation. This ranked the blog at about #30 in the SERPs for my "mainkeyword news" and "mysecondkeyword news". After I had a couple of months of news in there I then put an obvious image link on the homepage of the site and that really increased the amount of visitors to the blog.

I never requested links for the blog but slowly the homepage and some of the better postings received a few links and the blog started climbing the SERPs form my main KWs. (If you have lots of traffic on your site that his a huge advantage because you have instant visitors to your blog and a few of them will link to you if you do a good job - I get 20,000+ visitors per day on this site.) The posts also began ranking for lots of minor terms. After about a year and a half of hard blogging I claimed #1 position in the SERPs for my "mainkeyword new", beating out publishers, some .edu bloggers, a national association, topix.net, about.com. I then put "news" in the title tag of my homepage and claimed #1 and #2. Right now I am at #5 for "mysecondkeyword news" but moving up slowly.

The blog now gets about 2000 visitors per day (a few hundred from onsite links, a few hundred through off site links, a couple hundred from bookmarks and feeds, and the rest from search engines. It is a sticky part of my site with the average visitor staying a little over 8 minutes. The down side is that people who visit the blog read it and don't pay much attention to my adsense - it has one of the lowest yields on my entire site.

I recently set up a feedburner account and gave it full linkage from across my site with the feed and rss logo links. After a month I have about 70 subscribers and this brings about 30 visitors per day... plus a few other websites now publish my feeds. If I have a good story I can get a few hundred visitors from topix.net.

The way to get lots of traffic is to blog about upcoming news events if you can anticipate them as there will be very large search volume and being positioned well in the SERPs in advance has an enormous advantage for getting traffic and also links if you have a great post in place.

Bottom line... Is blogging the best way to get a return on your time? My answer to that is a flat "no". I could make more money and traffic building other things on my site. The blog format is awkward for SEO (custom built pages are better). Blogging the news isn't very commercial (would be better if I blogged products). However, I am not doing this for money. It's what I want to do, I like what it adds to my site - and that is what is important.

Adding to the above - while the habit of everyday is important it is best to keep a backlog of posts readily available rather than posting.

Start at a post and allow Google to crawl (monitoring every day until indexed/cached).

Then post a new posting and repeat, and repeat, etc.

You will notice that Google will crawl infrequently at start but each time it comes back there is always something new, it will quickly pick up pace.

The problem with posting a regular daily routine without daily crawling Google can miss many older posts until your blog is well established... and missed pages means they don't exist.

A GoogleMap will help this alot but remember to use fresh timestamp tags since the a newly uploaded map with old timestamps means 'it has already crawled'.

I'd like to ask a question about the line above. I'm very new to this SEO world and I want to learn as fast as possible. I've noticed many people uses wordpress to easily help them in ranking their keyword or pages on google. Does this mean I rather rank my page and focusing on custom built pages ?

thanks

In general, there isn't anything wrong with the blog format.

If you are competent in php code & SEO you can arrange the design with SEO in mind.

Unfortunately, blog creators and template designers are generally not SEO savvy, the design appeal and functionality are there greatest concern... and in that context EGOL is correct... you get more SEO bang... course that also implies knowing SEO extremely well so your custom pages are superior.

If you are not competent in custom design with SEO in mind - well the "blog format" is a dumbie setup solution that will do the job.

I agree with fathom. I had to spend a lot of time redoing the blog template to improve the SEO. I have it very close to the way that I want it but it is still not exactly what I would like to have.

I have the specs for a custom blogging set-up but still need to get it programmed. Other fun projects are in the way