It’s Been Awhile, Here’s Why….

If you are a loyal reader, an occasional reader, or are checking out our blog for the first time, you will notice that the last blog post we published was on March 27, 2007 – about a month ago.

No, we have not given up on blogging! It is still a great way for us to connect with our clients, potential clients, industry colleagues, and people looking to learn something new.

We have been putting off the creation of any new posts because we are moving our blog to a new platform. And we are very excited. Typepad has served us well from a functionality and ease-of-implementation perspective. However, when we first put up our blog we decided to use the hosted version of Typepad, which in the long run turned out to not be the ideal choice for our business.

First, we want our blog to be “on-domain”. Coming soon, our blog will start right at the KoMarketing Associates website, which will allow us to build up more content on our domain, increasing its overall imprint in search engines. Also, any links that we may be lucky enough to get to our blog, and individual blog posts, will have a greater impact for us than originating on another domain (e.g. site.typepad.com) and then coming to us – just as the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the strongest connection between two websites is a direct connection, not a relay connection.

Besides, it’s a KoMarketing blog, so why not have it right here (there)?

I am not saying that you never want an off-domain blog. Or that Typepad is not a good blogging package. There are times when one or both of these is applicable (e.g. if you want a secondary blog to supplement your other blogging/communication efforts). Perhaps if we had chosen to purchase Typepad’s developer-friendly counterpart, Six Apart’s Moveable Type package, we would have stayed with the overall product line.

But, we didn’t. And here’s something to think about – because we used Typepad, and not Moveable Type, or any other blogging platform that we had integrated with our domain, we now face the fact that we cannot use a 301 redirect to point our old blog post permalinks to our new blog. So, we’ll lose some of the link popularity and content aging credit we started to build on the old platform. So, we will not be completely able to take advantage of any inbound links to our TypePad content.  In other words, we are taking a few steps backwards in our own SEO efforts (irony) for better website visibility in the long run.

But, as my father says about investing, “the best time to start investing was 70 years ago, the next best time is today” – so, we are starting our new blogging strategy today. Part of which means that I will be posting more than a few times a year, and stop leaving all the posting to the other talented team members at KoMarketing.

Also, going forward, we will be using WordPress as our preferred blogging technology. Things change rapidly in our environment, so there’s no guarantee that this new platform decision will still be ideal for us in another couple of years. But, we’ll adjust again, and stay focused on helping our clients and enjoying our work along the way.