Blogs and E-Commerce websites
-
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?
-
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. : )
-
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.
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Relaunching a website - SEO implicataions
Im looking to relaunch a current website, that will undergo a complete makeover. Can you you tell me what factors I need to consider in doing this, particularly with regards to maintaining seo and migrating the current site in general
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aplnzmarch180 -
Should my website be accessible by IP?
I have been doing some digging in to this today essentially triggered off by looking at the secure certificate on my site and comparing it to others as i have been seeing some security warnings on a random basis. I noticed that on all instances none of the other sites IP addresses re-direct to the website, whereas on my site it does. is re-directing the IP address to the website a big no-no?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WAWKA1 -
Under-performing blog as part of main site
Hi I was hoping to get some thoughts and opinions on our blog. It is part of our main site (not on a subdomain) but performs very badly, pulling in very little organic traffic (only accounting for 0.6% of our organic traffic). Every page of the blog is listed in our sitemap, and using Screaming Frog I've done spot checks of several pages to see if they are indexed, which they have been. Looking at Google's text cache, all the content is visible. Pages are often well shared on social media (for example): http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog/2014/10/antarctica-photography-safari-2014-updates.aspx I'm aware that we do need more links coming into the blog but I still feel that it should be performing better than it is. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KateWaite0 -
Website (.BE) showing up in .NL SERPS
Fellow mozzers, we need your help We have a situation where a customer has two websites for each country: flowtracksurf.be → Belgium flowtracksurf.nl → Netherlands They used to have very good keyword rankings in the SERPS in BE & NL. Flowtracksurf.nl had good rankings in Google.nl and Flowtracksurf.be in Google.be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacobe
Recently there has been a change: Flowtracksurf.nl is not showing up in Google.nl anymore. It also seems that all the rankings from flowtracksurf.nl have been switched to flowtracksurf.be. .BE is doing very well, .NL is suffering. Data shows us that .NL : In the first two weeks of december 2014, we see a massive drop in traffic (GA) In that same week(s) we see a drop in search queries (Webmaster Tools) We see the exact opposite in .BE (growing strong in those weeks) When we look at the cache of flowtracksurf.nl we see only reference to flowtracksurf.be. Is that a hint of what was going on? On the same date that we see a massive drop in traffic on .NL, we see a peak in 'indexation' of .BE We see that the MOZ pages crawled dropped in that same week for NL We're also seeing that all the traffic from Google.nl is now going to flowtracksurf.be. Some keywords we were scoring #1-2 for are: surfvakanties, surfvakantie, surfcamp mimizan, surfcamp, frankrijk, surfcamp spanje, surfen frankrijk We just can't figure out the hard evidence in the data.
Can you help us on that?0 -
How to deal with duplicates on an e-commerce website
Hi guys, So we have an e-commerce website and we have some products that are exactly the same but come in different colours. Lets say for example we have a Samsonite Chronolite and this bag comes in 55cm, 65cm and 75cm variations. The same bag also may come in 4 different colours. The bags are the same and therefore have the same information besides maybe the title tag varying due to the size and colour. But the descriptions are the same. How do I avoid Google thinking I am duplicating pages or have duplicated pages. Google things we have duplicated when the scenario is as I have explained. Any suggestions? Best regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iBags2 -
Same website, seperate subfolders or separete websites? 12 stores in two cities
I have a situation where there are 12 stores in separate suburbs across two cities. Currently the chain store has one eCommerce website. So I could keep the one website with all the attendant link building benefits of one domain. I would keep a separate webpage for each store with address details to assist with some Local SEO. But (1) each store has slightly different inventory and (2) I would like to garner the (Local) SEO benefits of being in a searchers suburb. So I'm wondering if I should go down the subfolder route with each store having its own eCommerce store and blog eg example.com/suburb? This is sort of what Apple does (albeit with countries) and is used as a best practice for international SEO (according to a moz seminar I watched awhile back). Or I could go down the separate eCommerce website domain track? However I feel that is too much effort for not much extra return. Any thoughts? Thanks, Bruce.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMcG0 -
How would the rich snippets be treated in AJAX website?
Hi guys We have started to rewrite our website http://www.edamam.com on AJAX, and the idea is to have all the website on AJAX in the next few months. Although it would probably be difficult to index even with the Google Crawling protocol, and some other issues might appear, the engineers insist that from technology point of view this is the best way to go. We have already rewritten the internal search result pages, e.g. http://www.edamam.com/recipes/pasta and last week we set the Google Crawling protocol for AJAX to some of the individual recipe pages to test it. I'd like to ask for you opinion on whether the rich snippets we have in the search results will be affected by this change? Are there specific actions we need to take to preserve them? What other hot tips you have for dealing with AJAX on any level of the website? Thanks in advance Lily
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wspwsp0 -
Website structure question - linking to categories?
Hi there, I have a video website (user uploaded clips) which are sorted into 75 categories. Now, these categories have their own pages and 90% of the traffic comes from the category keywords. All 75 categories are linked from the homepage (which is obvious, right?) AND from all video pages. Now, my question is: from SEO point of view, it is OK to link to categories from the video pages, too? I am in doubt here because: 1. I tend to think it is OK because I get a lot of traffic for the category keywords. 2. I tend to think that isn't OK because I get almost no traffic for the video pages. Any thoughts? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasmin280