Does your site have a blog?

[Luxoria]

A goal I want to achieve with blog is to bring in traffic using keywords related to my ecommerce site but that are not being targeted by my ecommerce site.

A question I am having a tough time is where to place the blog; subdomain vs. subdirectory. Now, there is all kinds of threads everywhere debating both sides but very little feedback from the view of ecommerce administrators.

If you have a blog for your ecommece site how is it setup? Does it bring in traffic for you? Do you use it as an expression of company personality or is it just another marketing outlet?

Any insights from a SEO perspective is welcome as well.

tyty

[ssgumby]

Ours is setup as mysite.com/blog .... I mainly set it up as an informational tool, with hopes of maybe some SEO benefits. However we have really struggled making use of it and I honestly am not seeing the benefit. We use facebook heavily and that does drive lots of traffic to our site so we have found ourselves putting more effort into that as opposed to our blog.

[JackieBlue]

We used to have on our own site but had better luck with blogspot, with links back to our site.

[Hoople]

also in sitename.org/blog/

With the volunteer organization site I do the older news items staying up have a lot of SEO value keyword wise. It saves me from having to deal with huge news pages they'd used in the past. All the old stuff just shuffles back on its own giving a forever changing page close to the site's root that Google and Bing seem to like (usually the next item in the SERPS).

[votrechien]

We have our blog at sitename.com/blog/.

For E-commerce sites, it's not the most useful thing in the world I find (no one wants to read daily about you hawking products). We use it mainly to post about new product updates and revisions.

What we do though is have a link to the top 3 most recent articles dynamically posted on our homepage. At the very least, by showing new blog posts every week or two it demonstrates our company is very much alive and active.

[Luxoria]

That's what I was thinking votrechien, my goal is mostly to post about new product lines, new models, and custom work we have done. I don't even expect any followers, it's mostly for the SERPs and to demonstrate that we are an active company thus promoting trust. =)

[CPC_Andrew]

Yeah I would think that's the best way to go about it. A separate blog that points back to your website. Ours is blog.sitename.com which has been pretty successful but that's because we write a lot of content.

I think ecommerce blogs on products have potential, the content just has to be able to be created. Think out of the box, such as contests or something that you can write about long-term and keep the links pointing back and forth.

[Novus]

I have a blog on blogspot that I run a long with our ecmommerce site/Twitter account/Facebook page. It does'nt send much traffic, I set it up as a away to get my ecommerce site pages indexed which has been a huge problem, it works great for that but very little traffic.

I generally add latest news, videos, music, new releases monthly.

As the content varies from month to month there's not enough consistency in SEO terms and generally doesnt show up to often in search engines