Business Blogging Best Practices

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.

Original Article Present on: Business Blogging – Choosing between sub-domain,

sub-folder and separate domain.