I’ve been in the business of business website consulting for 4 1/2 years at this juncture. Most of the concepts have stayed the same; great SEO, continuous new content, balance, etc. There are two things that have changed the landscape a bit in that time. The first is social media and how companies can use it in some form or another for their advantage. The second… the conversation about blogs or articles.
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Back in the day it seemed a fairly easy conversation. Having articles on a website makes a lot of sense to a degree. If done properly they help enhance the authority of a website. They’re fairly easy to optimize and, when done well, end up with their own page rank and many more opportunities for websites to be found fairly high for their search terms.
Nowadays a couple of things have changed. One, search engines value new content more than static content; even a page ranked fairly high will only maintain itself for so long. Two, more website owners and businesses want the ability do certain things for themselves, which means they need an easy process; not everyone knows how to write code to add new pages to their website or links within the website.
This means blogging becomes a more viable option for some people. In some ways, blogging it easier. You can write multiple short posts and keep your website relevant. You can write long posts and keep your site relevant. You can easily add video or sound to a blog. Blogging is easy because you don’t have to know how to code anything. You should for maximum effect but you don’t have to.
So we come to this conundrum of whether a website should have a blog or articles. Actually, for me, it’s not a conundrum at all. I tend to believe websites need both. And I’m prepared to say why.
Websites should have articles that pertain directly to what they say they do. I’m going to use the example of my business website to highlight this. My business website says I basically do two things; leadership/management training and health care finance consulting. Within the health care finance consulting, there’s one thing I do specifically that’s more specialized, that being something called charge master consulting. Not all consultants do this, so it’s my edge, if you will.
Now, I could just write about this every once in awhile in my blog, but that’s really not strong enough for me. Since this is a core business issue it needed that specific link that I shared. However, if you follow that link to the page, which talks about the service I provide, you’ll see I have 3 other links on that page. All of those links are articles I’ve written that are related to what I do. That helps the search engines really zone in on what I do for business. My main search terms are all in the top 10, most in the top 5, for providing this service. I used to be number one for all of them but you just can’t always keep the big dogs down I’m afraid. 
I have a similar page talking about leadership and management, and I link to some articles from that page as well. But there are many more people that provide these same types of services. Therefore, even with the articles I have, I need more of a boost when it comes to that topic. Hence, my blog talks more about leadership issues there than anything else. Doing that helps keep my site in the SERPS, although I still battle for recognition. My checking it last night when I was putting this together has me at 143 on Google, 103 on Yahoo and 136 on Bing. In a crowded field that’s not bad, but it can be better.
So, this is my argument for having both articles and a blog on a website. How do you see it?
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