Static website Vs Blogs Vs Forums

nims · Posted: Fri Nov 24, 2006 7:46 am Post subject: Static website Vs Blogs Vs Forums

Hi after going thru various topics and discussions I have really gained good knowledge about SEO ( thaks to dcz Very Happy

). As a result now I have started thinking much more seriously about my websites.

Somewhere I read, forums are not google's ( I want to concentrate on google mainly bcos its the major search engine ) favorite/preffered to index in SERPs unless your website has a high ( above 5 ) page rank.

Now my question is, from SEO point of view, which is better to have ?
1. Static website ( with dynamic content ) in php or html
2. Blog
3. Forum

I think it wud be an interesting discussion as I wud like to put my websites or experiences forward as a case study.

dcz

I fully agree with the experimental approach you suggest when proposing your web site as a case study.

I am not talking about turning your web site into a general example, far from that, but I take this occasion to elaborate a bit about how we should all survey our SEO results.

When starting a new web site, we need to target our first keywords in what will be the content and work on optimizing on them since the very beginning.
But we should not think the SEO cooking is done once and for all, and rather keep experimentation in mind. Because what is true one day (you're first on this query) can change the other day for reasons that mostly are out of your direct control (stronger challengers, algorithm update and etc).
That's why, an organized result survey is important.
Because you have good probabilities to find out keywords or keywords combination you did not consider enough yet, and already providing good results.
You could also find out some web sites are bringing a lot of visitors, and that you could go further into building contact and link exchange with it's webmaster.
And you could as well find out some things needing to be fixed, broken links, things like that.

The idea behind this is to try to work on our projects best parts, and to find them out. As they could end up being quite different from what we first though, we need to properly observe things, effects and causes, theory and experimentation (is what I though is true, how to find out it is ? etc ..).

Then, about the static / blog / forum problematic, it depends.

IMHO a web suite needs new content added on a regular basis to obtain good results in SERPs. Not necessarily a lot, but one page of content a day is a good rate.
Then, URLs needs to last in time to obtain PageRank.
The last thing to have in mind is the way the page is linked in the web-site.

As you can see with phpBB SEO, it's very possible to be found-able for a forum. But good content can be "buried" in the forum pagination.
I mean, their content is still interesting for some, but they'll appear as less important if they do not receive answers and start disappearing from the forum's first page. Bot's will not find links to them as easy as before and will start "thinking" it has become less important.
Forums are not really adapted nor meant for article publication.

For more detailed content, a more static structure in which this important content will continue to be linked the same way as before (even better if you manage to add some links sometime, from a forum for example) is better.
The best is to have both a dynamic and a more static structure. And note that I am talking about structure, to mention the way content is surrounded, because topic urls do not change, it's the way they are linked that could.
So it's all a matter of how you'll use these different tools together rather than which one is the best.
Blogs and forum can be interesting for a project, because they'll add dynamic content, but still, you should only start one if you have content to put in it.
A simple CMS can be enough to both add news and articles categories.
++

jean98 · Joined: 27 Oct 2006 Posts: 3

It seems that recently with all of the splogs and abuse fo the glog and ping strategy that if you choose to SEO a blog - expecially from a free blogger or WP account then it will take much longer to be viewed as a trusted site.