Creating your own blog for back linking to your site

[Hardley1]

Our competitor seems to be linked to a blog that they have created themselves. From an  SEO perspective is it worthwhile creating a blog that is related to your particular industry and then  only including links back to your site. Also is there any way to upload ,articles etc automatically to the blog to cut down on the people hours involved in updating content?

[djlaidler]

Hi,

Depending on the nature of the blog and size of your site, I would consider creating the blog as a folder within your site. Having a blog that refers to your business quite a bit is best found under your domain as it provides a great deal of long tail keywords, will provide a lot of internal linking which done right improves usability and most importantly it gives your site breadth and depth,  giving it an air of authority.

As for mass uploads and reduced man hours.  Firstly, in my mind the only blogging platform that excels at optimised layout is wordpress.

Although you can copy paste content from editors (like word), I would highly recommend you give the relevant parties their own author logins,  teach them all the editing options and style requirements and have them draft everything in wordpress. For added consistency, have an editor (a nominated person) look over it to ensure each article has the same look and feel before publishing. If it is simply pre written documents,  I would suggest copy/pasting them into a plain text editor eg. Notepad and copy/paying them to wordpress.  This will remove the formatting. To save on the man hours, employ someone of oDesk to do the grunt work.

Articles uploaded from Word and other word processing applications often paste poorly as they have a number of hidden tags that leave a mess of styles.

Dan