A customer recently asked me about the viability of creating lots of static content pages for his website, with the aim of matching it to a variety of similar SEO phrases. Fool to myself that I am, I turned the job down. Why? Because, as I told him, it wasn’t in his best interests.

Free blogging tools, easily available via the internet, allow for the easy creation of content on a level that far outstrips the relatively laborious task of creating static pages. And having a blog on your site gives far more benefits than made-for-SEO content pages.

A couple of years ago creating static content was a must for any webmaster serious about search engine optimisation. But since then the landscape has changed.

For starters, the search engines won’t necessarily give any authority to static pages that contain little content bar a list of basic search keywords. And certainly such pages don’t offer anything to your website’s users.

Blogging, on the other hand, creates content that people want to link to. Even a poorly written blog will attract more natural links than a well-made but made-for-SEO content page. And blogs are interactive; your readers can take the article and run with it – take politicalbetting.com, for example, which functions almost as a chatroom but is basically a simple blog with an enormously popular comment thread on each article.

Furthermore, blogging gets a lot of long-tail search terms into your content naturally. Their importance was recently underlined in a great article on Search Engine Watch. Using static content pages will give you few long-tail terms (unless you want to create thousands of pages); a blog will give you hundreds automatically, without you even having to think about it.

And with blogging software so easily available (TypePad and WordPress are two of the most popular free tools; this blog runs on WordPress, but bigger sites may want something like Expression Engine that delivers wider functionality), there’s just no argument for not having a blog. WordPress lets your readers comment on articles; it automatically pings search engines to tell them you’ve updated your content, and basically acts as a hugely powerful – and free – content management system.

The trick to being successful is in the content itself, though. People will only read your content (and thus link to it) if it’s unique and of a high enough quality. THAT’s the skill a good SEO company should be able to bring to the table, and if your blog isn’t getting you results then you should start looking elsewhere.