Very cool that Paul has started blogging. Welcome! Love to see you at Northern Voice 2007 blogging conference and I'd love to continue the debate in person. Coffee's on me, Paul!

Paul still thinks static websites and link exchanges are valuable and points out a valid use of meta tags (your meta tags show up underneath your google and other search engine listings).

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My SEO article was written for small business owners with simple web sites who want their sites to show up in Google searches. While Tanglao makes some valid rebuttal points, some of his points do not apply to those with static web sites.
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Tanglao says “Link exchanges are a waste of time…” However, CanadianActor Online, like countless other web sites, has move up the search engine ranks primarily based on link exchanges.

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Blogging did not make business sense when I was writing for newspapers and magazines. Nor did it make sense when I was writing primarily for corporate markets. My static web site, supplementing my direct mail and other marketing techniques, drove some clients my way. But mostly it was there to act as an extension of my business card and direct mail – so that people who received my marketing material could read more about me on my web site and see samples of my work. Then they could decide if they wanted to ask for a quote.

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I disagree about link exchanges. Better to blog something compelling and leave a permanent link in a blog comment or email that link to somebody who's relevant rather than spamming people to link to your site.

Yes, a static website is much better than no website. But with modern blogging software like WordPress and content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, Plone it's easy to setup static pages as well as blogs and you then get all the advantages of blogs (ease of editing, RSS which leads to higher search engine rank) and traditional static websites. This means you have a system where anybody can update the content without needing a webmaster or FTP which means the site is more likely to be up to date unlike most static websites.

A timely example of static websites being NOT up to date are most of Vancouver's restaurant websites. You would think that they would have their Christmas hours posted on them. Alas most of them don't because they are static websites set up by "technical" people and designers and the restaurant owners and their staff have no idea how to update them. Very frustrating.

If they had a blog or if they used blog software just for static web pages, the owners could easily update the site's static pages and/or blog with their opening hours.

I'll go further. Technical people and web designers who recommend to clients to use static pages with FTP, Front Page, Dreamweaver, etc. are doing their clients a disservice! It's 2006 not 1999!

Better to use WordPress (even though I work for a Drupal company I'll continue to plug WordPress for blogs and simple static sites; use Drupal if you want a comprehensive web presence including a true community site) and just use its static web pages features and make the blog part invisible) than to use some custom or hand coded static site.

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