WordPress is a fantastic platform on which to house your blog. One of the best things about it is the fact that it’s free, and so versatile!A blog is simply a way to publish out content easily. You can use it to share information about special offers you are having, to distribute news, share information and educate your clients and potential clients. With a simple and easy to use Admin portal you can quickly create new content without having any web design skills or knowledge and do it in style.

No doubt you have heard of  Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Good SEO means that the search engines are finding your website and indexing it correctly. When this happens it means your site will come up in the search results when someone types in keywords found on your site. When posting a new article on your blog, you have the power to determine those keywords directly, giving you some control over your own sites SEO.

Why do the search engines like new content? Their job is to find new information to spread out to visitors on the web. They may come to crawl through your site for the first time and look at the content, then index it. They might even come back the following week to look for more new content. If don’t find anything, they might come back next month, and then again, but would eventually stop looking at your site due to old or stagnant content. If, however, you have a blog and therefore are continually adding new content, the search engines will love your site. They will come back again and again to grab the new content and share it with the rest of the web.

If you do a search online, you would find two sites for WordPress. WordPress.com and WordPress.org. While both are free and made by the same developers, there are some big differences.

WordPress.com will host your blog on their servers at no cost. However, this means that the address for your blog will be a sub domain of wordpress.com. In plain English, you will not be able to pick the web site address used for your blog and will need to link to the blog from your main website. Not ideal.

From WordPress.org you can download the files needed to install WordPress on your own server. This means that you can use your own unique website address and totally incorporate it into your current website. Your blog can be designed to fit right in with your pre-existing site and follow the color scheme and design you have.

WordPress.org allows you to create your own themes, WordPress.com has only a limited amount of themes you can use. WordPress.org allows you to add plugins (code that designers have created) to enhance the functionality of your site, WordPress.com does not.

There are other differences but adding WordPress directly to your own server offers you the most flexibility and functionality. Over the next few days I look forward to sharing information with you from some of my clients, in their words. Each one I have worked with and created a blog for them, they have seen a drastic increase in the number of visitors to their site, and the number of clients they are working with. Read their stories, then make your own decision!

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