Evergreen content: Dedicated section or blog posts?

[dgibbons]

As part of our content strategy we are creating an ongoing series of articles to help both our potential buyers and our users learn about our product and improve their knowledge of industry best practices in general.

Internally, we've had some debate as to where we should host this content within our site.  We've identified two approaches:

1. Series of blog posts
2. Dedicated knowledge section of the website

If we go with the first approach, we would created a dedicated section that indexed all the blog posts.  If we went with the second, we'd create blog posts for each of the articles announcing their addition.

Is there any difference, SEO wise with the two approaches?  What would you recommend?

Thanks,

Darren.

[entourage212]

Both are great options if done right. My suggestion would be:

Use your blog, create a parent category attach a description etc... if need be use child categories & attach descriptions. Use tags wherever possible, do not go over board and remain relevant. Post your articles within the appropriate child categories. You could maximize this effort by having people subscribe to your "post series" they opt-in via email and every time there is a new post a message would be sent to the subscribers. This allows you to stay connected and relevant while building leads. IMO the SEO benefits are greater using a blog as blog posts offer 2way communication, & have a greater tendency to drive traffic & can be optimized easier in and tend to (IMO) be indexed quicker.

This is a very condensed version of strategy for what you described but as a general rule of thumb anything dynamic that will require 2-way communication or constant updating / new material is best suited for a blog & anything static that is updated rarely etc... is best reserved for pages.

A Knowledge Base for your site is a good idea still and can be optimized. But for the sounds of what you are describing a blog post series would make more sense. IMO.

[EGOL]

If we went with the second, we'd create blog posts for each of the articles announcing their addition.

This is what we do.   We have a blog that gets six to ten shout-outs of news every day - mostly pointing to other websites in our industry or on news sites that have a relevant article (this content is not evergreen).   Our own content (which is evergreen) is place on an article page and a blog annoucement is used to get the word out - because we have a nice list of people who subscribe to the blog feed using Feedburner RSS or email.

We also have a retail site with a blog.  It gets lots of "how to" articles that might have 1000 works and a few images.   Although these are published through a wordpress blog the posts are organized by interest level on category pages on our website - not in blog category format (which is by date).

[gmk1567]

Blog pages have more value than the knowledge section static pages. Also blog posts and knowledge section contents should have different tones. From user perspective, normal users will like to read blogs instead of knowledge section which used to attract serious users.

So blending both will be the right approach.