Now here is a web sized hot potato. You run a business, you have a website and now you want a blog. But wait, you can't just want a blog, you must first answer one of those eternally tricky questions: should you host your blog on your existing website or should you create a whole new blog website at a new domain? I wonder, what is the best answer to this query?
The Best Options for Your Blog
The main advantages of housing your blog in your main website are:
- Branding continuity
- Easy for website browsers to find
- adds more content to your website
- Good source of link bait
And some of the key advantages to having a separate blog site are:
- Opportunity to get links from blog site to main website
- Separate of style between site and blog is sometimes necessary
- Blog does not need to be a hard sell
- More real estate on Google
As I say, these are simply a few key reasons and I would invite you to add to this list in the comments at the bottom of the page. So, taking the lists above, how is one to choose what is the best option for your blog? Well, I believe the answer can come easily if you take some care to set out what your aims are.
Setting Aims for Your Blog
To simply want a blog for the sake of wanting a blog is not a good reason to get a blog. Neither is wanting a blog because you want somewhere to write stuff. Both of these are too fluffy and will immediately leave you feeling a little lost. Blogs should have an overall aim. A primary aim of a business blog could be to assist with building a company brand. That could involve blog entries from the CEO and staff so that customers can interact more deeply with your brand and understand the human personalities behind it. If that is your aim, then the answer should be clear; have the blog on your own website. The reason for this is that you want the blog to be closely tied in with your company image, therefore it should be on your main website. An aim which takes a different approach for the blog is to use the blog as a place to establish yourself as an industry expert. This means that you are not necessarily interested in the 'hard sell' within your blog. In-fact, it is often advisable to avoid the hard sell in a blog, the more time you spend writing calls to action, the less time you will be giving useful opinions and advice on your area of expertise, and readers are experts at picking up on this fact. This aim gives the blog a certain need to detract from your main business goals and so a blog on a separate website would probably best do the trick.
But wait, what about SEO?
SEO, I hear you say? Well, when there is uncertainty about which blogging option will best for SEO I always like to remind myself of what SEO really is. SEO should be seen as the art of improving the content and layout of your website in order to make the information and services you offer more useful to the users of search engines. This includes making it easy for a search engine to understand what you do, making it easy for the user to find what they want on your site and keeping the user happy at all times. With this in mind I would always advise a common sense approach to the blog hosting problem. It may be that you are sure that hosting the blog on your own website will increase your site content and help SEO but if your blog has a completely different business goal to your main website then users and search engines will pick up on this. If you take the most obvious and common sense approach to your blog then search engines and users will notice. Try and fool them and you stand the risk of making a mess of your business goals and ending up in no-mans-land.
Think About It.
This really is a simple way of working out how best to host your new blog and will also prompt you to consider the true aims of having a blog in the first place. Set your goals well and it should become clear which option will best suit you.
