There are a lot of people that will tell you that you need a blog because it’ll perform better in search engines and gain more traffic. This is not completely false, but it’s not exactly true either.
Blogs tend to perform better because of the abundance of content. Blogs empower users to create content in a way that is easy and fun. By doing so, users are creating content on a daily, or weekly, basis.
More content means more traffic and links. This is more for search engines to index, more for users to link to, and more to share with their friends and co-workers.
More visitors can then lead to more sales and conversions. The more eyeballs that are in front of your content, the better the opportunity to turn them into your customer.
The same could be done on a website, but that doesn’t happen. People view blogs as something different than a website. This is probably because most website were built back in the day when you pushed a page live and then had to add a link in the navigation and it was all very technical. With blogs, those technical items get removed as blogs automatically do all the work of updating navigation, categories, feeds, and even pinging the search engines of new content.
Search engines like content, and they like fresh content. Blogs make this easy by giving the users the tools to create content easily. This in turn makes search engines happy and bring more visitors to your site. So, in a way, blogs do perform better in search, but it’s because users are posting more often and interacting with them more than traditional websites.
What do you feel are advantages to having a blog as compared to a traditional website?
To expand upon a point.
The blog is also a content management system, and this has overiding benefits when contending with that gamut of content you mentioned above. How do search engines and people find the content that is relevant to them, in amongst all that trash (one man’s trash is another’s goldmine etc etc)
A blog will collate content under categories – which are pages – and Tags, which are also pages with 50 posts you can have 100 pages. These pages are like sections in a library – BUT – the content is in many sections at once….makes it easy.
This can make the website visit highly user friendly – and it can make the content very rich and deep, which google likes. Why be a ‘veneer’ website when you can be rich.
Very good observation. It seems that more and more people are actually using a blog or blog style website, with frequent updates (posts) to be the front gateway to their business sites. They have clued in that blogs do indeed give them an edge. It’s also nice when these buisnesses add content that is valuable and offered free to the user. It is of course good for them in that it brings people to the business and let’s them reach more potential customers.
Yeah true… Because the content is more, sure landing pages would be more in blogs because every post has separate pages.
Moreover, one advantage – a notable one is the interactive layout of a blog, enabling readers to communicate with authors/organization.
More varied viewpoints than a single opinion makes blogs more interesting and inviting and inturn enhancing more visitor count.
Blog is personal and portrays a character. Convenient and flexible. 🙂