What is the best way to integrate our blog into our ecommerce website?

[reddogmusic]

Hi all,

We run an eCommerce website at www.oursite.com plus a blog (including news / articles / reviews / how-to guides etc.) at blog.oursite.com (those aren't really our site URLs, BTW ;-).

For SEO reasons previously discussed on here, and for ease of use for our customers / browsers, we now want to integrate the two more closely.

This will mean:

1. Our blog will move to www.oursite.com/blog
2. We will try to feature the blog content in places where it is relevant to customers (so e.g. news and blog posts about shoes would appear on our shoes category page, a review of some Adidas XL1000 shoes would appear on the Adidas XL1000 shoes product page)
3. The blog is currently run on a wordpress.com site, so we'll need a new CMS (or wordpress.org) to get more control of the data.

My issues are that, although it's good from a users point of view, having blog articles appear in lots of different places on the site might cause issues with duplicate content from a search engine's point of view.

Has anyone got any pointers on how to integrate the two in a way that will make most use of the good original content coming out of our blog, while not "watering it down" by spreading it around too much?

Can anyone point to examples of shops that do this well?

Is there any software (other than Wordpress) that people would recommend using?

As always, any help greatly appreciated!

Alex

[matbennett]

The general principal that we're trying to work towards now is to lose the /blog part completely. I'd much rather have the content "in deep" close to where it will help reinforce sales and where any shares/links will do the most good.

Where the site has regular users who might like the chronological nature of the blog we're using "new on site" type pages, giving headlines and snippets of recent pages.  These are quite handy in ensuring that new content gets indexed too!

Is there any software (other than Wordpress) that people would recommend using?

I've never been a huge wordpress fan myself, partly because I find it tricky to implement with other systems like this.  We've been working with Drupal more and more this year.  If you are used to nice friendly Wordpress to set up it is rather less than welcoming (See Drupal learning curve). However it is incredibly capable at this sort of thing.

[conversiontactics]

Do you know about  Rel=Canonical tag,  Its mainly use to handle duplicate content issues.

This might help http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

Also i am not sure if you can use this tag in segments.

[reddogmusic]

Very interesting - thanks! And makes sense. However, I can't quite get my head round how this would work in practice. Have you got any real world examples? Alex