Blogs and E-Commerce websites

[lindsayjhopkins]

I have recently launched an e-commerce website which has a whopping domain authority of 1!

I was thinking about adding a blog to it (it's in open cart), but that would mean creating it in a wordpress but using the same domain name.

Would this be beneficial from an SEO stand point (i.e sending traffic to w blog that isn't actually on the e-commerce website itself) , or am I better off creating content as blogs/articles on other people sites?

[Backlinko]

A blog is a must for an eccomerce site today, Lindsay.

That's not just from an SEO perspective. It also helps bring in new users, raises brand awareness and is pretty much the bomb.

Yes, you can easily add a blog as a subdomain (blog.site.com) or as a subdirectory (site.com/blog). You can go either way but subdomains are going out of style a bit in the SEO world. In my opinion it doesn't matter a whole lot.

Keep in mind that you can post content on your site AND other people's sites. That's actually a great recipe for success. : )

[itrogers]

Having a blog is definitely a smart idea. Even though you are using Open Cart, you can just create a subfolder on your host called 'blog' and run WordPress out of there. This way, your main Ecommerce site will be on example.com and your blog will be on example.com/blog. Google won't care that you're running two different CMSs. You are creating the content on your domain and as long as both CMSs are linking to each other then both your blog and Ecom site will gain benefit to any links.

Since Open Cart and WP are both open source, with the right development (or developer) you can actually tweak both systems enough to share the same template files, this way they look the same from a design standpoint. That's really another question in itself, but to summarize, yes, you should start your blog and definitely use wordpress for it if you are comfortable with it.

[MattJanaway]

You can install Wordpress on the same domain on a page like mydomain.com/news

Blogs can be a great source for gaining visitors and also keeping your website's content fresh.

Also, with regards to blogging on other sites or your own site, I wouldn't assume you should limit yourself to one or the other - do both As long as you blog on other sites and build natural looking links then this should help your site rank better and in a safe way.

Don't underestimate the role that a blog can play in building links to your site. If the content is good, you might find some natural links firing your way but even if this doesn't happen you can build links to your blog posts manually which would then send "juice" through the rest of your pages

Matt