Building a solid web presence and setting it up for the very best possible search rankings takes a ton of hard work! Think about it… There’s the design, the coding, developing and organizing lots of quality content, along with a whole bunch of other imperative steps that must be correctly handled to make the web presence rank as highly as possible in the search engines.
Building from scratch, both websites and blogs require most of the same process to be followed to help them get off to a positive start with a rock solid foundation. However, once the groundwork is all complete, continuing to grow and improve the web property is another thing altogether. To stay competitive in the search listings, ongoing development and optimization must continue.
This is where a traditionally navigated website really beings to gain ground when compared to a site set up as a blog. Let’s take a minute to compare and contrast the purest forms of both standard navigated websites versus normal blogs.
Navigational Structure:
- Website – Traditional website navigational structure flows in a tree and branch structure. Main pages lead to secondary pages, secondary pages lead to third tier pages, and so on down the line. This hierarchical structure makes sense to humans and search engines.
- Blog – Blog navigational structure varies. There are pages, there are posts, and there’s just a thin line between them. Category pages replace the main secondary pages of a standard optimized website. Blog posts replace the lower tier content pages. Unless it’s thoughtfully planned out, the structure of a blog tends to be random.
The Date Factor:
- Website – With a traditional website, once a page is developed, the content doesn’t automatically expire. Sometimes a quick update or refresh is needed in places, but well written content will usually hold its own for the foreseeable future – both for human readers and search engines.
- Blog – Perhaps the biggest major downfall to the blog structure is that it tends to be time sensitive – that is, the newest posts are displayed first and then disappear into the murky depths. Because they were initially intended to be literally web published logs (thus the term weblog, and later blog), visitors and search engines often only pay attention to the most recent posts.
In some circumstances, blogs do maintain favoritism, especially with visitors seeking current news and information. They know where to look for the latest material and how to tell exactly how old it is. Blogs also tend to be sticky, thanks to their visitor-friendly comment features.
George Chaney
President/CEO
SEO King, Inc.
