SEO Best Practices: Setting Up a Blog

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.

Usually post should be relevant to the topic and to the point.

Setting Up Your Blog

Once you know you’re trying to achieve, you need to consider where the blog resides. Should you use a sub-directory, a sub-domain, a completely separate domain, or either WordPress or Blogger? Let’s look at all the options.

Blog on a Subdirectory

More often than not, this is how I recommend clients set up a blog. In my opinion adding fresh content to the root domain is a good thing. I also believe that having an RSS feed of “latest blog posts” to the home page of the website is a good thing.

I believe that promoting content that resides “on” the website is a good thing because you can earn links and provide balance to your link profile. And, I believe that having thought-leadership content that is closely associated with your brand  is a good thing.

Pros:

• Add fresh content to the root domain.
• Add deep links (from other websites)/social signals directly to root domain (assuming that you’ve promoted this content well).

Cons:

• Won’t provide an additional “brand” listing (in most cases) in the SERPs, so doesn’t serve well for reputation management.
• No direct ability to get links “from another website/sub-domain”.

 

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”; Ability to deep-link to specific pages within the root.
• Piggyback on the already “built” 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.

Blog on WordPress.com or Blogger

Some pretty large companies have gone this route because – to them – it’s the easiest to execute. Mind you, a link from WordPress.com isn’t a bad thing, but how does this help with any of the aforementioned reasons why you might want to blog in the first place?

Are you tying in the “thought leadership” to the brand? Are you adding fresh content to the domain? Are you aiding your abilities to provide an additional “official brand presence” to the SERPs? (Perhaps, but you’re better off with subdomain).

Pros:

• You could create some very aggressive link building tactics or “test” things without burning the domain.
• You would gain a link that is coming from an authority domain (remember, a quality link profile is about gaining links from many different/authoritative/relevant websites/domains; not many links on one domain)
• Easy. Just about anyone can get engaged and start blogging today.

Cons:

• Limitations as to how you can design/template to fit your brand.
• Any content promoted (linked to) won’t provide direct value to your main company website/domain.
• Inability to utilize plugins.
• Cheesy. It is what it is. Not gonna be a great representation for your company.

 

Blog on a Separate Domain

Some people like to create a “non-official” blog presence, to have control over a website that isn’t directly tied to the brand. They want to have an “unbiased” voice and probably use this to occasionally link to their main website.

I typically discourage these types of initiatives, for many reasons – not the least of which is the amount of effort that would need to go into making this new web presence gain any amount of trust/traction or authority.

Pros:

• Can create an “unbiased” resource (that just happens to link to your corporate website, on occasion).
• If the content is good, and it becomes respected in your industry, the blog can gain authority that can then be passed through to your corporate website through “unbiased” linking.

Cons:

• There’s a better than average chance that gaining good authority/ability for posts to rank is going to take considerable time.
• Does little to really show thought-leadership for your company.
• If you really do drop links to the corporate website, there’s a good chance that it’ll be seen for what it is: a paid advertisement, not an official unbiased reference. The backlash from this could be (should be) huge.

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.