Company blog. What are the best solutions?

[Awaraman]

Hello Moz Community!

Our company has its own blog (www.awarablogs.com) - the blog was created some time ago by means of a simple blog-engine. Now we see that the structure of the blog is bad for SEO (it has long URLs, many useless folders, subdomains and so on), so we'd like to simplify it. But the engine doesn't allow to change its structure in the way we 'd like to. Our webmaster suggested that we use "Alias". Will this method really help us make our blog SEO-friendly? Or is it better to choose another blog software like Wordpress?

Thank you very much!

[spencerhjustice]

I concur. Wordpress is an excellent option for blogging and it would definitely better to put it on a subdirectory of your main site. Something like http://www.awaragroup.com/blog would be ideal.

[David-Kley]

I would use either Joomla or WordPress in a subfolder of your main site. Easyblog for Joomla is great, some work has to be done to get rid of ugly URLs. WordPress would proably be your best bet if you are looking to use it for blogging only.

I also noticed you were still using Joomla 1.5. I would think about upgrading that platform, due to security and it being unsupported by most modern plugins. If you like Joomla, and want to stick with it, upgrade to 3.2 and install easyblog. Their site has a ton of info on setting the URL structure to "simple" mode, which gets rid of the stuff you typically see in poorly planned out sites (/component/easyblog/YOURBLOGHERE/post/etc)

We have used both in the past, it really depends what you are familiar with and what platform you like the best.

[TheeDigital]

Aliasing would make the urls a little easier to digest, you also might want to look at .htaccess rewrites to get rid of entire folders that you don't need:

http://www.awarablogs.com/group/index.php/easyblog/entry/employee-engagement-is-a-key-driver-of-modernization-and-innovation-

In this example I would be getting rid of index.php, easyblog, and entry since group is what you are using for your blog.  There are many reasons to get away from this platform, I took a brief look and besides the folder structure each blog has 3 h1 tags, the logo, awaragroup - blog, and then the post title.  As Andy suggested, Wordpress is great for blogs and is free, and might even be easier to use than your current system, so long term I would look to make the changeover.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

In the longterm, moving to a platform like Wordpress will be a much better solution. This powers millions of sites, is hugely customisable and very good for SEO, with a lot of control, thanks to the Yoast plugin - and it's free!

-Andy