Let’s say you’ve finally been worn down by our (plus others’) persistent trumpeting of the benefits of business blogging (e.g., “B2B blogging can improve organic search”), so now you’ve decided to take the plunge and start yours. One of the first questions you’ll face is where – virtually speaking – to set up your blog.
Just in time, Jeffrey L. Cohen has posted a nifty guide over on Social Media B2B for weighing the pros and cons involved in that selection. Click on over for more, but here is a quick summary of the options he reviews…
Host on your company site, at /blog. Creating a /blog directory on your company site and hosting the blog there is the most common approach; it makes it easy for site visitors to find the blog from the website, and easy for blog readers to find content on the website. If your posts are titled with terms your target is looking for, your posts will be found by search. But unless someone is searching for your company name and the word “blog,” all you have are the post titles to drive traffic.
Host on your company site, at /keyword-phrase. Let’s say you’re an email provider: you put the blog directory on your site as above, but name it echosoft.com/best-email-practices, instead of echosoft.com/blog. Now, the full URL for every post contains the term “best email practices”, which adds a lot more search power to every post. And you still get all the benefits of the first approach.
Host off your company site, at fancyname.com. Some blogs have fancy names, like Thoughts Spilling from Our Heads, hosted at thoughtsspillingfromourheads.com. Nobody is ever going to find this blog through search. Social media is about driving traffic to your site, not about showing off how smart or ego-centric you are.
Host off your company site, at keywordname.com. Better than the “fancy name” above is to call your blog Best Email Practices and host it at bestemailpractices.com. Now the domain name itself has good search value, so when coupled with well-titled posts and relevant content will drive more traffic …to the blog. However, a separate blog is not the best way to optimize your website for search, because driving traffic to a directory on the main site helps search traffic on the whole site.
But whichever approach you end up choosing, do be sure to provide links both ways between the blog and the corporate website.
