ECommerce keyword targeting: Blog post vs Category page

[BruceMcG]

I'm targeting short head and chunky middle keywords for generating traffic to an ecommerce website. I guess I have two options both with great content:

1. blog posts
2. category pages with content (essentially the blog post).

On the basis that it is great content that gets links, I would hope that I could garner links into the heart of the eCommerce website by doing this through option 2: category pages.

Any thoughts on blog vs ecommerce category pages for tageting keywords?

[EGOL]

Actually, these articles are "posts" on a wordpress blog, but I am not using category pages or monthly pages or other things that would make them look like a blog.

Instead they are linked into my website through the homepage, through category page, and every product that they are about links to these article pages.

Really there is no difference between a blog post and an article. The difference is that a blog usually integrates its content into your site in a way that is both dumb for your visitors and for SEOs.  So, use the posting ability of wordpress for its convenience, but build those pages into a website using the traditional methods that serve visitors and SEO.

[BruceMcG]

Interesting @EGOL. You've decided to do web article pages, not blog posts. I guess this is because you've wanted to make have a long comprehensive page and a category page will just not offer enough space?

And you haven't used a blog post because you don't want comments mucking up the keywords?

[EGOL]

We do the same approach as Gregory.

Articles about how to do things, how to select things, comparison between products, history of products, etc.  These are substantive articles usually over 1000 words, always with several photos and maybe a video.  Time consuming to produce.

However, these article pages pull in lots of traffic and almost always outrank our ecommerce pages and category pages.

Gregory seems to be using text links to move traffic to higher value pages.  We have house ads in standard formats (300x250, 160x600, etc) to route the traffic to our sales pages.  We also run adsense on those pages.   We can tell from analytics that lots of people who make it through our shopping cart enter the site through these pages.

We use Google's DFP on these pages to compete Adsense and an ad netork against our house ads.  Our house ads are valued by determining the number of people sent to our sales pages, their conversion rate and average shopping cart value.  We also have multiple creatives running and DFP picks the one with the highest performance.

Gregory... think about putting a few eye-catching ads on these pages with value propositions.  I bet that a lot more of your visitors will convert.

[BruceMcG]

Thanks for your response Gregory. Funny blog post, like the way you use apples.

The phrase "short head" is sometimes called short tail, the left side of the long tail graph with "chunky middle" the middle but not yet the tail.

I guess my question is whether anyone has been successful with getting links to category pages with good content vs blog posts/articles with good content?

[GregB123]

Hi Bruce,

I have two small ecommerce sites, so your question is very interesting.

I haven't heard before the phrases you used: "short head and chunky middle keywords". I guess keywords are described differently in NZ

We started out adding content by adding "article" or "guide" or "how to" pages to the site. These pages do not contain any Buy buttons, but do contain image and text links to our store pages. You can see an example here: http://www.bestdryingrack.com/How_to_dry_flowers.html

These article pages (on both sites) tend to be some of our most active landing pages, though they don't feed people into the store pages at a high rate. But even at a low rate, they are a super cheap way of letting potential customers know about our stores.

But we have since switched to adding content in a blog format. The blog is of course hosted on the site in a /blog/ folder so it helps are total link count. We made this switch because it made it much simpler to write about a broader range of topics. Before we spent weeks planning and writing a 3 page "guide" and connecting it into the site. Now we can do a single page blog post in a day anytime we come across something interesting or amusing. And it doesn't even have to closely relate to the products on the ecommerce site. Here is an example: http://www.easydigging.com/blog/apple-peeler.html

We have not been running the blog long enough to know at what rate the pages will feed people into the store, but I assume it will be similar to the article pages.My hope is that we can post weekly and therefore create more blog pages than we ever used to create article pages. Doing so would feed more people into the store and also keep increasing our link count.