Blogs have an uncanny advantage over most static websites on the web today. Here are just a few of those advantages:

  1. They automatically alert search engines of new posts whereas a static website gets to simply wait to be crawled for the update to be picked up.
  2. They are also crawled in the same way a static website is crawled in addition to advantage number 1.
  3. They tend to rank far quicker for many different terms than static websites.
  4. People can subscribe via RSS Feeds which also announces new additions by the Blogger.
  5. There is a whole subset of search engines are available to blogs that aren’t as readily available to regular old static websites.

However while all that might be impressive and certainly many reasons why you should have a blog; it may not be worth all it is made out to be. Consider the following scenario:

You write a post targeted to reach a particular audience. Let’s say that post is all about foreclosures in your area. You then spend your time promoting that post through different social media sites, forums, maybe a press release and other types of marketing venues.

Sure you’ll get targeted traffic for this and you might even pick up a customer or two and a few really good rankings in Google in a matter of days. While this all sounds good here is what happens next in this scenario:

The housing market is no longer in trouble and our economy is stabilizing out. The banks and lending companies are just about back to normal with foreclosures in your area and new homes are priced so well that this is the latest buzz.

You write a post targeted to reach people interested in new homes and since foreclosures typically indicate a formally inhabited home, you decide to stay clear away from mentioning foreclosures except maybe in a brief passing. You then spend your time promoting like you did before.

Now you’ll get a whole new group of targeted traffic. However you are still getting traffic from your foreclosure post and that particular targeted audience is now seeing a post on new homes. This creates for a potential increase in bounce rate and lost business.

Not only does a Blogger have to find a creative balance when making sure not to alienate one target audience or another but they also have to worry about maintaining rankings for older posts as well.

Every time a Blogger posts a new post on a different topic, closely related or not, they are giving search engines the idea that their topic of interest has changes which then begins a slow and steady rank decline for past targeted keywords you’ve spent time and money targeting.

How about tried and true static websites? Do they have advantages? Absolutely and I have a few advantages to point out about them as well. They are:

  1. They don’t typically change all that much and when they do it is partially due to syndicated content which isn’t always seen by search engines depending on how the website owner is choosing to display it.
  2. Because they don’t change all that much their rankings tend to be long lasting even though it almost always takes some time to rank for targeted keyword terms.
  3. Visitors come to recognize your site and learn how to navigate it. This would help increase your return visitor ratio.
  4. The more times someone visits your site the more likely they are to do business with you because their return visit usually means they are keeping an eye on something you have.
  5. With a little creativity you can syndicate pages of your website to other websites and even get to those special search engines like Technorati.

Clearly there are advantages and drawbacks to both methods. One shouldn’t replace the other though at this stage of the game.

Final Thought: While you are constantly posting new posts to your blog you should be spending equal amounts of time building onto your plain old static websites.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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