Article Directory – Create blog or static web page?

What’s the most effective way to attract visitors if you want to add an article directory to your own web site?

I ghost write an article each month for a client’s web site and submit it to article directories. He now has over 10 articles and wants to use them as content.

Two thoughts came to mind how to implement the best strategy. Here are the pros and cons of each:

1. Create a blog

I would create a blog in a subdirectory of his site ie www.domain.com/articles/ then easily add the articles each month threough the backend administration panel.

Pros

Easy to set up
Easy to maintain
Easy to create any number of categories
Pages are dynamically created
RSS feed built in
Automatically pings RSS directories when updated
Blogs get quickly indexed by the search engines
Article posts are automatically archived

Cons

Generally blogs need to updated more than once a month to be effective traffic generators
Takes more time to set up than a static web page
Contains database and 100s of more files than a simple static web site
Need to continually update WordPress software that runs the blog to keep ahead of security fixes
More difficult to customize WordPress template than static web page

2. Create a static web page directory

The static web page would contain the titles and brief descriptions of all the articles. Each title would link to its own web page.

Pros

Easy to create
Integrates well with current web site..use same template
Pages would be on the same level as other pages ie www.domain.com/articles.html
Search engine friendly..just need to add meta tags

Cons

Takes more time to maintain
Need to log into FTP manager when adding new pages
Need to add link to article directory page plus create a new page for the article

Conclusion

An article directory in the form of a blog would initially be more difficult to create if you want to customize the template to look the same as your main web site.

Once a blog is set up it’s easier to maintain because you can add unlimited pages which can easily be categorized, archived and indexed by the search engines.

Please comment if you can think of any other great strategies (a script perhaps) for adding an article directory to your web site?

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Herman Drost is the CEO of http://www.iSiteBuild.com
Affordable Web Site Design, Web Hosting and Marketing.