Adding content to a blog. Pages or Posts?

hi scouser,
yes, google loves blogs more because a blog is updated more regularly than a website (that is what google assumes) also, with some plugins and customization you can do very well in cases of SEO (e.g. link structure). so yes, i´d say - use a blog and fill it with content. and again - yes, content can be anything - from text to image and video. of course search engines can "read" text better than video or images but if you add some keywords to your videos or alt tags to the images that works for google also. i´d suggest though to also put in words what is in a video - this also helps disabled users. hope that helps.

Short answer to a long question. Wordpress has many good SEO qualities built in. Specially if you extend the functionality with plugins such as "all in one seo" and others. Even if you are not that good at seo, Wordpress does a lot for you. With all the themes available now I build all my sites with Wordpress (OK ... a couple Joomla and HTML) because you can tweak it the way you want to and not break it.

content can be: text, audio, video, images (seo all of them including file name for images and video). You want to have different types of content ie text, images and video because people digest information in different ways. Some prefer to read, others to download and listen on their ipod, others to watch etc.

By it's nature a blog has posts that cycle through ie the latest content is always at the top. To do that you use posts and categories. The other advantage of using posts is that they are included in rss feeds - pages are not. Pages are generally used for static type information - contact, disclaimer, about etc. However, pages are also useful to add a pillar type piece of content as search engines seem to give them a bit of importance weight. So mix it up posts/categories for most of the stuff and really good articles - pages.

Hope that helps.

I've seen a recommendation to use a page for a review of your opt in offer. How does that work with ranking?

I personally have successes with putting both pages and posts.

Let me elaborate a bit on how I use pages:

I'm speaking in the context of a wordpress blog, so here we go.
When you are targeting say 3 primary keywords, its best to open up pages with keyword rich and SEO optimized page.

For instance, your keywords are: Car Deals, Car Auctions and Used Cars; and your blog is pinkycars.com

When you add a page with your keyword - Car Deals - you get this url:
pinkycars . com/car-deals

Now, assuming your blog title is "Pinky Cars", and couple with free wordpress plug in like seo ultimate - the title of your newly added page would return:
Car Deals | Pinky Cars
www pinkycars com/car-deals

This has supplied me with pretty good onpage SEO benefits.
1. You have a higher density keyword in your title
2. you have a higher density keyword in your url

To further bolster up your "Car Deal" page, go ahead and add a some blog posts (content and keyword rich) and do deeplinking to your "Car Deals" page.

For example:
You might wanna add a post with the title "how to uncover the best car deals" and have links with anchor text "car deals" link back to your site and your car deals page.

Do a couple more posts and you'll see greater impact. If you are on a more competitive niche, you'll need to do some (or lots) offpage linkbuilding to your posts and pages.

Hope this helps,
Haruka

Go Haruka! that's great.