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SEO |
Your blog should be the centerpiece of a larger initiative, one that engages your target audience in a "human" way, with the goal of creating signals that will aid/support what you're trying to achieve with SEO.
One mistake many businesses still make is creating posts that consist of self-promotion with little "meat" to entice anyone to engage with the content, much less share the content (in the hopes that you might earn a link or two, or any "viral" activity to the post, whatsoever).
Trying to Achieve?
How you answer the following questions will guide one of the most important steps that you'll take when setting up a blog:
- Do you have issues with reputation management – i.e., negative brand mentions in the search engine results pages (SERPs)?
- Are you trying to build thought-leadership for your company/brand?
- Are you trying to build a channel to drive deep linking to specific pages of your website?
- Are you trying to build depth of content or develop a tool to target "human queries" for your otherwise "corporate" website?
- Do you want your blog to be non-branded and/or seen as a unique "unbiased" voice in your industry?
Setting Up Your Blog
Once you know you're trying to achieve, you need to consider where the blog resides. Should you use a subdirectory, a subdomain, a completely separate domain, or either WordPress or Blogger? Let's look at all the options.
Blog on a Subdomain
A good case can be made for why you might want to blog on a subdomain.
For example, perhaps you have issues with reputation management (perhaps someone posted to review complaint sites like Ripoff Report, Pissed Consumer, etc.) so you need to occupy additional real estate in the SERPs. By building your blog on a subdomain, you accomplish this by providing the search engines another "official web presence" (the search engines will treat this as a separate entity) for your company, that should rank when folks search your company name.
The nice thing about having a blog on a sub-domain is that it will also piggyback on the authority of your root website (hopefully you already have some authority on your root domain) and posts there can rank, without the need to build up the authority for a new website.
Pros:
- Get an additional brand presence in the SERPs that you control.
- Get links "from another website" (subdomains are treated pretty much as such); Ability to deep-link to specific pages within the root.
- Piggyback on the already "built" (again, making an assumption here) authority of the root domain.
- Can be hosted anywhere. Very important consideration for those on a content management system that does not provide a blogging platform.
Cons:
- Not as much freshness on the domain.
- Content that "hits" (gets good promotion/links) doesn't add as much link value to the root.