For most savvy businesses, regular blogging is seen as an integral part of their overall marketing strategy and a great way to engage customers. Without it, sites can become too static and find it difficult to appease Google’s general liking for updated and new content.
There are a few ways you can have a blog set up:
- As part of your site domain (www.mysite.com/blog).
- As a subdomain (www.blog.mysite.com).
- Or as a separate entity altogether (www.xxxblog.com).
Whilst you can always link into an external blog from your main site, and vice versa, having everything on the same domain actually comes with some other advantages which benefit your business.
The Benefits Of Having Your Blog On Your Website
First of all, by splitting your blog and your main site over two domains, even a subdomain, you are setting each as a competitor to the other. They may be linked but in SEO terms they are considered separate entities. If you want full value for your SEO efforts, then keeping them connected on the same domain makes more sense and can add value to your site as a whole.
Back in the old days, separating your blog from your main site was seen as a neat way of getting inbound links to boost your SEO. That’s not the case now. Google is pretty much against anything that looks like artificial link building so it doesn’t work the way it used to. More importantly, if you have a number of links coming from the same, external blog site then you could find your search engine ranking falling because you are being penalized. You are much better off having your blog within your domain and linking internally (which, incidentally, does Google like).
Having a blog on your site domain is also better for your prospects if you want to convert readers to customers. It’s also more beneficial for you as a company because everything is hosted on the same site which makes it easier to maintain things like brand identity and make sure everything is properly integrated. Whilst of course one website is less effort when it comes to maintaining your website.
Having constantly updated, pertinent content on your main site will help improve your overall SEO. If you provide a service then the chances are your main site will be static for large periods of time – you have written the content for the services you provide and don’t see the need to update them. The problem is that search engines like seeing new content, something which a blog naturally provides.
Of course, there may well be legitimate reasons why you should want an external blog. For instance, you might be producing content which doesn’t sit well with your current brand identity, or you might want to separate yourself as an individual and set yourself up as an industry expert. All this is fine but there has to be a clear reason why you should want to separate your blog from your main site, and clear benefits from doing so.
In all other instances, your blog should be on your main site and of the type: www.mysite.com/blog if you want it to have all the benefits that come with the content.