From Website to Blog (Part 1)

Over a month ago in my article on SEO siloing and AdSense I mentioned how my debt-free living website could be redeveloped as a blog using the principles of SEO siloing for dead-on ad targeting. I've decided to go ahead with the transformation and to use it as a case study on how to transform a website into a blog. One of my readers has recently done this with one of his own sites and has told me it's led to increased traffic. So let's do it. But first let's talk about why we're going to do it.

Why Transform A Website Into a Blog?

So what possible reason would we have to transform a non-blog website into a blog-based website? After all, a blog is just another kind of website. What special advantages does the blogging model confer? Here are some reasons for making such a transformation:

Easy content management. Blogging systems are a specialized type of “content management system” (CMS) because they make it easy to create and update content. Many non-blog sites are managed by hand, which gets to be a pain when you have to update things like sitemaps (both the human-readable and Google-readable kinds), “what's new” pages, menus, etc. A good CMS removes barriers to updating content, which is a good thing.
Better indexed content. There are directories and search engines who only deal with blogs and avoid non-blog sites. If you transform your site into a blog, you can get indexed/listed by these kinds of tools, i.e. Google Blogsearch.
Easy content syndication. Even though RSS and other content syndication formats predate blogs, many people associate them specifically with blogs. But you can create feeds for pretty much anything. Your non-blog site can have a “what's new” feed that gets updated whenever you add content to the site. But if you have a blog, you get such automatically updated feeds with no effort.
Built-in interactivity. Readers can leave comments and trackbacks. You can even let (trusted) users contribute their own content.

What about the downsides, though? Here are some potential barriers to making the transformation:

The need to update content. The best blogs are the one that update their content on a regular schedule. It may not be daily, but it's usually predictable. If you change a site into a blog you'll feel pressured to update the content. It's one thing to update one or two sites on a regular basis, it's another to update 50 sites on a regular basis.
More resources. You need more disk space, more memory, and a database to run a blog. Performance may be worse than a non-blog site — the simplest websites need nothing but a bit of disk space. These days, though, even the most barebone hosting account has everything you need to run a blog, so this may only be important when your traffic levels are high.
Inflexible site structure. Blogging software will force you to structure things a certain way. Until WordPress 2.1 was released, for example, you had to jump through a few hoops to create a blog that had a static page as the home page. These may make it hard to adapt your existing site structure to what the blog expects.

Given how small my current site is, though, these barriers don't exist for me, and I think that the need to update content on a regular basis is probably good anyhow — search engines love new, original content after all, and if making something a blog forces you to update things, it's probably a benefit to you in the long run.

Next time we'll look at the preparatory steps needed to transform a site into a blog.

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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.