Saturday, October 1, 2011

What's good for a Business Blog: A Sub-Domain, Sub-Folder or a New Domain

You might have probably heard that hosting a business blog will help you in your internet marketing plan and you have started planning to have a business blog.  Business blogging no matter helps, whether goal of your business to have website is lead generation or if you have a shopping cart or if it just exists for branding and educate your potential customers, business blogging can help you with everything. It will help you in SEO as well.

So what’s the best practice to host a business blog, on a sub-domain, in a folder structure or on an entirely new domain? Here are the pros and cons of choosing between these options for business blogging.

Having a business blog on a sub-domain or sub-folder has following benefits:


         ·         Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Most of the Search engine optimizers will advise you to go for business blogging for the simple reason that it will help improve website’s ranking in search engines. Now the question is How? Whenever you publish a new blog post a new web page is created that can be indexed in search engines to help you get found online, so for this you really want your business blog to be associated with your main website. That way, any SEO juice you generate from your blog will automatically benefit your business website as well. Hosting your blog on a free platform’s URL like http://businessname.wordpress.com will only guarantee that the SEO credit you’ve built gets applied to the blogging platform, not your own website.

      ·         Branding: There are a few negatives associated with hosting your blog separate from your main website that affect your company’s branding. First, even if you link to the blog from your website’s main navigation, your site visitors will get sent to a completely different website, which may not espouse design and branding elements consistent with your main website and may result in confusion. Furthermore, sending site visitors to a blog on a free platform can result in the perception of your brand as unprofessional or unreliable.

        ·         Centralization: If you have planned to have a separate domain for business blogging then you lose the engagement to happen on your main website, and you want your blog visitors to associate your blog with your brand name. Because our ultimate goal is to attract visitors to your main website by using your blog. So by hosting blog on a separate domain you’re sending website visitors away from your main website. Another thing with this is that you have to run separate link building campaigns, one for your corporate website and another for business blog.

By now you might have probably figured out that its best to have a business blog either as a sub-domain (e.g. http://blog.businessname.com) or in a sub-folder (e.g. http://website.com/blog). Free blogging platform like blogspot, wordpress, typepad etc. are strict no no for business blogging.


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