When adding a blog to your website it is important to keep a few things in mind. Blogs are great to increase your website ranking in search engines, however if they are not used to their full capacity, then it is questionable wether it will add any benefit to your website visibility. Here are 5 things to keep in mind when adding a blog to your website.

1. What For?
   What do you plan to use your blog for? A blog is best used to add additional information to support the content that already exists on your website. This may consist of special offers, product reviews, special occasions, informational articles, news releases etc. Do not copy the exact content that exists on your website or you will trigger a duplicate content penalty in search engines and your website rankings will decrease rather than increase.
2. How Often?
   How often do you plan on updating your blog? How often will you add new posts? In order for your blog to be successful, and by successful I mean in order for people to come back and visit it often and more importantly for search engines to rank it highly, you need to add new posts a minimum of three times per week. Ideally you should post at least five times a week. If you cannot update your blog as often as this, then it may not be worth the effort to include a blog on your website.
3. Blog Location:
   Where you put your blog is very important. Many people will setup a new account with Blogger or the like and use their space. This results in a domain such as “yourblog.blogger.com” and they will usually like to their website and vice versa. Although this is a start, it is not the best start. Instead your new blog should be hosted on your own space and should be located as either a subdomain of your own website or as a subfolder. So ideally what you want is something like “www.your-web-address.com/blog/” or “blog.your-web-address.com”.
4. Blog Name:
   If your blog is hosted on your own space then “blog” is the most common term used for ease of use. If it is hosted on the blog systems URL, then it is best to use descriptive keywords seperated by hyphens and limit it to about three words maximum. So if you sell HP printers for example you could use the domain “hp-printers.blogger.com”, otherwise, your own URL should have your most important keywords in it and therefore “blog” should be sufficient.
5. Blog Plan:
   To keep your blog up to date it is best to have a plan in place of when you will update the blog as well as what topics you will update it with. Plan what topic you will post on each day of the week to ensure that you have enough content to write about. With a plan in place you can also schedule blog posts, writing them in advance.