Switching A Static Site to a Blog - Anyone Know the Pros and Cons?

The overall effect of switching a static site to a blog platform should bump you up a good amount. You will want to submit the new blog to all the appropriate engines (technorati, digg, etc)

You should make an effort to submit new material to the site during the first sixty days, and keep a weekly article going onto it. If you don't plan on submitting fresh content, setup some RSS widgets to draw content from some good partner sites with relevant information. The RSS will not give you premium ranking, but it will give you more than leaving old content on the blog.

This is something that I recommend to my clients all the time. WordPress isn't just a great blog platform - it's also a lightweight content management tool, and a great way to manage a small website. You don't have to worry about losing page rank on your domain when you do this, but if you have individual pages within your site that have high page rank, you'd like have to give that up, at least temporarily, because your urls will almost certainly be different in WordPress than in your previous site. But that's probably not an issue, because for most sites, the page rank is highest on the index page anyway.

I would put a blog platform against a static site any day in terms of SEO. The entire basis for the platform begs to score higher and higher, and the content management side is a no-brainer for most small businesses.

Once you figure out a series of widgets and plugins that work well on some template designs- its easy to make a very functional blog site. I'm just tweaking some of my current blog settings on technicaldisaster right now. The same amount of work on a static system would have taken weeks.

A properly optimized Wordpress blog, sindicated throught the right places, summitted all over can have a decent page rank almost out of the shoot if you start with an exisitng url.

my 90 days old blog comes up on huge, deep searches (search advertising consultant, internet advertising consultant) and only has a page rank of three on the index page, higest page is 4.

Other than clout, I have found that actual organic placement, and the traffic it gleans, is much more satisfying that page rank.

Our solution is to maintain our own Theme and plugins designed for maximum SEO. We can 'push' and existing site, or rank the blog, whichever we prefer.

Try to keep the URLs the same if you can and that will make the changeover seamless to the search engines, your users, and any links that you have already built up. Otherwise try to use 301 redirects to point the old addresses to the new addresses.