If I have an existing blog, say in Wordpress, Blogger, or Blogspot, and decide to migrate my posts to CM1 to take advantage of the blog functionality, what will be the short- and long-term impact on my SEO?
Sites like this one here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-guide-…
Are great sites that talk about SEO and how to maintain the same search ranking after moving a domain
Things like 301 redirects can be put in place to link your old blog to your new blog without impacting search ranking.
I guess in the short term the impact on SEO will depend on whether or not your blog is currently associated with the Wordpress, Blogger, or Blogspot domain.
When you move your blog to CM1, it will be a sub-directory of your main website (yourwebsite.com/blog).
You can minimize the impact if you set up your blog as a subdomain of your site, then make the re-directs.
If you are at least on CM1 version 2.6, you can edit the metadata of your blog post pages and take advantage of better SEO optimization by entering keywords that will help in increasing tremendously hits on your pages by search engines:
Long term, I would say the impact is positive and optimized since you can increase hits and even page ranking on your blog with the SEO feature on page metadata discussed above.
You can find more information on how to create a blog in CM1: http://help.percussion.com/how-to/how…
Ultimately this depends on how long (how much search rank) you have had your external blog for.
For most cases, SEO only matters if it actually draws folks to something you care about - conversions, leads, etc. By integrating your blog with your site and doing some basic redirects (301s) you retain most of the search traffic and get a much higher conversion rate out of the search.
Having said that, for extreme cases, such as an employee with a “personal brand” blog, you might be best to keep a blog where it is, and have dual blogs and cross link them - the organizational blog and the personal branded blog. This also allows you set a sort of “food chain” of inbound links. Tweet links to external blog which links to organizational blog which links to promotion which links to actionable page, and so on.
The wider net you cast, the better.