Custom Blog Engine and SEO

[hindsey]

This is my first post here, and I had a question. I have used blogger and wordpress, but for a friend of mine recently, I designed a blog engine from scratch to use on his website.

I am looking to expand my "customers," and I was wondering if there are advantages or disadvantages from a marketing perspective (thinking specifically Search Engine Optimization), between having a normal blog, or having one that is designed specially to fit into the existing website.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

[Nathan]

If you have a completely custom blogging platform you have a lot more flexibility, because if you want more features you can just code them. However, it may also make integrating your blog with other services much more difficult.

Whether or not you should use a custom platform depends on how well you can code and good your custom platform is.

[stephen todd]

Originally Posted by hindsey

This is my first post here, and I had a question. I have used blogger and wordpress, but for a friend of mine recently, I designed a blog engine from scratch to use on his website.

I am looking to expand my "customers," and I was wondering if there are advantages or disadvantages from a marketing perspective (thinking specifically Search Engine Optimization), between having a normal blog, or having one that is designed specially to fit into the existing website.

Thanks

I've over 10 years experience of SEO and Web Development - and a constant problem I've faced is making a wordpress blog blend in with an existing site

clients want to keep their site - and SEO's want to add a blog for traffic reasons - i.e. make use of the built in RSS feeds and updating content

the home page is the most important page - and this should incorporate updating content - so in that respect having a blog as the "site" makes sense

unfortunately a lot of clients don't like the look of blogs - and prefer the look of a "normal" website

the software to "skin" a wordpress blog so that it looks like a normal website costs about $127 dollars if I remember correctly - making it pricey

so my answer is:
1/ make a blog that looks like a website for new builds
2/ make a blog that can access the site's CSS - so that it automatically blends in


in my opinion, adding a blog to a site loses the one of the primary advantages of having a blog - constantly changing home page content - its like having a blog and setting the option of having a "page" as the home page - you lose the updating home page content, and therefore the SEO advantage of a blog site over a static site

[hindsey]

Thanks for the input... I guess my question is really down to the SEO. Does google.com index a blog at blogspot.com better than it would index my custom one? (for example: PrayForItaly.com is one that I built.)

Any thoughts?

Thanks

[stephen todd]

Originally Posted by hindsey

Thanks for the input... I guess my question is really down to the SEO. Does google.com index a blog at blogspot.com better than it would index my custom one? (for example: PrayForItaly.com is one that I built.)

Any thoughts?

Thanks

yes I have thoughts - but doubt if you'll like them!

the cornerstone of SEO is getting your keywords into the links pointing to the site's pages - this pushes "authority" at the target page

enough authority pushed at a page will get it top ranked - regardless of the quality of the on-page content

here are 3 links - yours, blogger, mine:

your post link:
PrayForItaly.com l BaroneTV - Episode 19

blogger post link:
Lancaster Garden of Hope: Lancaster Garden of Hope

my post link:
Life Insurance Policy Tips at Life Insurance

pretty obvious that yours is the worst and mine is the best (as usual vBulletin is screwing up the link urls - check them on your browser bottom status bar as you hover over them)

mine is only good because I didn't leave wordpress permalinks set to default - I use custom SEO permalink structure to deliberately make SEO friendly hyperlinks

some people claim that google treat blogger blogs better than other blogs - I don't believe it though - unless somebody showed me two identical blogs - one wordpress, one blogger - each with identical posts, permalinks, backlinks, etc. then showed me different pagerank, alexa, etc. I'd say google considers the SEO factors, rather than the blogging platform

[hindsey]

Thank you for that tip; you just gave me a new project to work on! (getting all my dynamic pages to have user/search engine-friendly urls. Unfortunately, my host doesn't seem to provide those url-rewriting services on the server side, so I'll have to find some other way... anyone have any ideas?

[blogenhancingtips]

I do many websites by doing wordpress seo only. It works well if you have a good keyword.

[JeremyMorgan]

It really depends on your software. Does it generate W3C validated code? Does it have a good structure that can be crawled easily? Does it have duplicate content? Does it use a lot of tables? If you cover these bases it should work just fine.