I think that Blogs absolutely have a role to play. My website is largely "reference" in nature - people would go there to find out about the general nature of its subject matter, which changes very little if at all, day-to-day, research what they wanted and leave. I have found that instituting a Blog provides a means of commenting, interpreting, and adding insights (hopefully) into news and events that have a bearing on the main site, but do not change the fundamentals of, in my case, the investing process. Another considerable advantage to me is that the Blog comes with clean code, that I cannot easily mess up. So it loads fast, unlike my main site which was (and still is, though I am working on it) laden with images (Charts) and java (real-time foreign exchange rate tables) that slowed the site so much that, according to my logs, many visitors were simply clicking off before the page had fully loaded. Because Blogs have RSS feeds that are easy to implement and are easily "pingable", changes to the site, or just general on-topic news, can be communicated quicker and more effectively, to a wider audience, than an announcement on the Home Page could achieve. On the presumption that anyone considering SEO developing is certain to be much more web-savvy than I, these Blog advantages won't count for as much. But I am certainly glad I started one.
Actually I kind of feel the same as Gemini. Blogging has become such a "trend" with the mentality that everyone's gotta do it, cause it's the bomb! That's silly. The reason it's gained such a level of hype is because people were creating CONTENT, and other people were reading it, and SOME blogs became insanely popular. Somewhere along the line the translation has become 'if you build it, they will come'. Unfortunately that's the same trap everyone fell into during the the dot com boom/bust. Content is still just content, in any format. When it comes to marketing a business you still need to look at all possible strategies for promotion and prioritize. Not all blogs will be successful, achieve great rankings, or bring in gobs of traffic. If you really want to utilize blogging for seo, then look at: 1. adding unique content to your site (in whatever format works best for you and your visitors), and then: 2. get OTHER bloggers to link to you.
The purpose of blogging seems to be overlooked a lot and especially on forums like this. Blogs are supposed to be information providers and not doorway pages. One thing I know is that the search engine algorithms are going to wheat out the bad from the good. If you just blog to do seo, your blog will not have the type of content that people want to read. My advice is to find something you like blogging about and then keep it up ... and you will get what you deserve
"wheat out"? There really isn't any reason why something like a blog or a forum can't have a dual purpose. The advantage of both is fresh content... spider bait... new keywords... What does it matter what the initial motivation is or was? If the blog or forum has no interesting content, it won't flourish. If it has enough new interesting content to attract people, it will grow. If it grows, it will gain in SEO value for related sites. How did this forum start? Initially, IIRC, as a place to support SEO tools. Now, it's grown to a stand-alone forum.
Some people are good at creating the right balance. There is nothing wrong with that. But IMO 80% of what is out there is lacking that. We have either weblogs from people who just blog for the fun of it (who haven't even heard of adsense) or the ones that are contructed only to gain serps or increase revenue.
Blogs are great and Google still loves them. Now, with autoblogging software you can just about set it and forget it.