When you use a blog you can write as many entries as you want, and your website will fit perfectly. However, if you add a new page periodically (and therefore add new menu items), your website will look bloated because of the menu items. If your purpose is to write lots of articles you definitely need a blog.

I think a blog=opinion, website = info/product. Depends what your content is.

Sites that have evergreen content that is updated with new or fresh material is just as viable as any blog. Don't let the kidders kid you. Content is content. Always has been, always will be.

If you are looking for site improvement re: traffic and conversions, then you need to look at the site as a whole (whether a site or a blog, no difference!). Make sure your engagement practices are correct, that your users are satisfied, and that your setup is normal "best practice" and does not contain anything which might impede indexing, or give wrong signals for snippets, titles, keyword(s), etc.

What worked 10 years ago does not work as well today.

Might look to site layout.... is it "mobile friendly", for example. Is your navigation top heavy? Is your content on the thin side? Do you have duplicate content? How badly has your site been scraped and reproduced by others? Is your niche rising, falling, or merely running flat?

I could go on for another few minutes asking these kind of questions, but you'll find most of them addressed here at webmasterworld.

Just know there ain't a lick of different between content on a blog or a site, other than how it is stored and presented. Also know that UGC these days is deprecated by most search engines, and is falling out of favor at the largest web sites.... so if you are a blog that can be detrimental, and most standard-like web sites will not feel that "pain".

Look to what YOU are offering to the web/user first. If it's truly top notch you have a better chance and a reason to exist. If it's "just another site about WidgetX" then maybe the competition is the reason for any decline.

@tangor

Just know there ain't a lick of different between content on a blog or a site, other than how it is stored and presented. ..

disagree I follow one <capital city > blog - blogs are normally opinions , an individual view of the world, whether it's fashion or politics, these blogs are more effective combined with social media.

If it's a sell site or an info site a website is more common and the manner of presentation is different. A blog is more a personal view, others are more factual without an opinion. Even SEO blogs are just that .. an opinion of the author

We're talking mechanics. Content is content, even "opinions" are content. A search engine doesn't care as it is indexing WORDS, and also taking note of where and how those words are presented.

I freely grant that blogs are general opinion sites, but not all of them, just like web sites are general info/business sites, but not all of them. As regards the OP's query, this disagreement would be a hair that does not need be split.

As for "opinion" ANY posted on the web (or printed in media, broadcast, etc) is an OPINION, commerce, info or whatever. "In our opinion you need know about this..." whatever it is. Heck, history books are opinion. :)

In the OP's case, the query was "do I need a blog to get noticed and better results (paraphrased)"? The answer is NO.

Blog platforms are better than static html because they have better cms tools built in like automatic sitemap updates,automatic internal linking, trackbacks and pings which can help attract search engine attention to your new content. It matters less what you call your site (blog vs article) or how your site looks. It matters more about the capabilities of the technology that is powering your site. There are many evergreen article sites that are being run using a cms initially designed for bloggers. A good cms helps you be more efficient and efficiency tends to lead to better profits and less headaches.

As noted above, we're talking mechanics, and every word uttered by goodroi is grand advice and an observation of what needs be done... A CMS (or a blog) is not essential to that, only the CONCEPT of a CMS and updating is required. Many of us have been doing this for years without a third party involved, and usually more secure as well.

It's not HOW you publish, it is WHAT you publish that counts.

Static "evergreen" articles work great for us (and have done for years). We do well in Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.

It makes sense to use a blog for time-sensitive LIFO (last in, first out) content, but for many sites and topics, a hierarchical structure is a better choice. And sometimes the two approaches can work well together, with a static hierarchical site for the main evergreen content and a secondary blog for time-sensitive material and random items.

@EditorialGuy I have to say a great big BINGO! on that comment!

Content is content, even "opinions" are content.

Thank you! The only thing that defines a blog traditionally is that it is a weB LOG (thus blog) and therefore is in reverse chronological order (LIFO as EditorialGuy says). That "rule" has completely changed though and many blogs aren't organized this way. Some blogs have weighty articles. It's just nomenclature.

trackbacks and pings

Do trackbacks and pings still make any difference? I never pay attention to them anymore (in fact, because of trackback spam that used to a problem, I usually have it turned off).

Anyway, you can get all of those features (automated sitemap, etc, etc) on platforms that are not blog platforms at their base (Drupal, Sitecore, etc) and many people use Wordpress in ways that don't resemble blogs at all.

The one thing I would say to play Devil's Advocate to goodroi (and FTR I use a CMS of some sort for almost everything) - if improperly configured a CMS can also shoot you in the foot with dupe content and such. I am in the final stages of redoing a site that is on a poorly configured CMS that has SIX valid URLs for every page except the ones that have EIGHT! So while a decent CMS has useful tools, it also follows the old dictum that a computer can make as many mistakes in a day as a team of humans working for hundred years.

Also, they can sometimes be slow. Again, that's usually a configuration issue, though sometimes it's architectural (complicated joins if you want to show certain types of data).

But that's just to play Devil's Advocate. In general, most CMS have gotten markedly better with regard to basic technical SEO over the past 5-8 years and most that I know have some option for caching that can keep them fairly speedy.

If it's good content and garners links and people read it and like it and share it, it makes no difference what the underlying technology is in general.

I know we don't need cheerleaders here, but when something is said right, it should be acknowledged. Ultimately it is all about the CONTENT. How that is wrapped is part of the equation, but without the content the trimmings/method makes no difference.

If there was a real advantage to a blog over a site, we'd have moved there years ago, chasing, ever chasing, the next highest serp...

Then again, most of us are not basically stupid to ignore what might work, thus blogs and sites have value and it is HOW we work those options that make the difference.

And you know what? This has been one of the better threads in recent days at WW as it looks to the underlying philosophies of how to do things on the web. Hats off to all!

this has been one of the better threads in recent days at WW

Agreed! I build CMS websites from scratch. That means full administration interfaces along with the public side of the website. My sites have articles and other forms of content. Articles are often presented in a blog format initially but the arey also presented permanently in "blog categories" which serve as evergreen (somewhat evergreen anyway) archives. Menus don't contain links to every article on the site but the article categories are easy enough to get to. Sure, these sites don't have every bell and whistle that WP does for example but they're also far more secure IMHO. I also configure my sites to provide only the features that I want (which goes to the security aspect as well). I can provide member services if appropriate or not. It's been a lot of work over the years but at this point I have a great library of code with speeds up development significantly. The idea of blog posts vs articles has been not really been a question for me for a long time. I build websites. They have content and I try to present it in the way it will make the most sense to my visitors.

And again, there are a lot of great comments above in this thread and it's refreshing to see this kind of discussion here.

I use a blog platform (WordPress) to serve up non-blog content (events) because it's easier for me to maintain, even though we had to develop our own custom event plugin to handle the internals. The users like them, I like them, and Google appears to love them. At one point I tried to maintain a blog on one of them, but I ran out of time and ideas for reasonable content, and even when I did (rarely) come up with what I thought was a reasonable blog post idea, hardly anyone ever viewed it. What it broke down to was the essential argument for the site's existence. People weren't coming for the blog, they were coming for the events. Similarly, I've had several B2B clients try adding a blog to their ecommerce or brochure sites just for the sake of having a blog - it didn't work. Because they didn't have the essential argument; people weren't coming for the blog.

I've had several B2B clients try adding a blog to their ecommerce or brochure sites just for the sake of having a blog - it didn't work. Because they didn't have the essential argument; people weren't coming for the blog.

They don't have to come for the blog if there's a reason for them to go to the blog once they're on the site. (Most users don't go to the "press" section of a site, either, but that doesn't mean a company site shouldn't have a press or media section.)

Whether to have a blog (and whether to use a blogging platform like WordPress for a site that isn't a blog) is an editorial and/or business decision. There's no right or wrong--as tangor said, "we're talking mechanics."

In general I feel articles = higher quality evergreen stuff and blog = short lived gossip and click bait (low quality).

A timely article on this very subject from Search Engine Land. Raises some interesting points and well worth a read.

[searchengineland.com ]

Actually it's moved beyond content and into spying now. A webmaster putting out the world's best content onto the most optimized site ever will still not outrank a webmaster who has purchased big data about his competitors and the entire niche.

With Google becoming a content creator, albeit an automated one, and with the ability for articles to write themselves based on statistics and facts the time of webmasters as we know them now is drawing to a close.