Not integrating your blog with your website
Your blog is published on its own domain, separate from your company’s main website. Even worse: Your blog is published on a free blogging platform’s domain such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com, or TypePad.com. Eeek!
A - WHY IT HURTS
Not integrating your business blog with your company’s main website can be damaging for
several reasons :
1 - SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
One of the biggest benefits of business blogging is its impact on search engine optimization. Because each new blog article you publish creates a new web page that can be indexed in search engines to help you get found online, 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 corporate website as well. Hosting your blog on a free platform’s URL like http://companyblog.wordpress. com will only guarantee that the SEO credit you’ve built gets applied to the blogging platform, not your own website.
2 - 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, undermining your credibility as a business.
3 - CENTRALIZATION
You might be hosting your blog on a separate URL only after you’ve purchased a unique domain (e.g. http://thisismyblog.com) and linked to it from the main navigation of your company website. While this is a better practice, you’re still sending site visitors away from your main website. This is counterintuitive, as usually the goal is to attract visitors to your main website by using your blog as bait. Ultimately, you want all of the engagement to happen on your main website, and you want your blog visitors to associate your blog with your brand name.
B - EASY FIX
1 - SUB-DOMAIN
Our recommendation of the ideal home for your blog is on a sub-domain of your main website (e.g. http://blog.website.com).
2 - WEBSITE FOLDER
Another good alternative is to put your blog in a folder of your main website (e.g. http://
website.com/blog). Both of these options will allow your corporate website to benefit from the
search engine optimization advantages your blog will generate.
3 - SEPARATE DOMAIN
Hosting your blog on a completely separate domain such as http://thisismyblog.com is a third option, and it’s an okay alternative. However, if you decide to go this route, bear in mind that you’ll ultimately be embarking on two separate link building campaigns – one to boost the SEO of your main website and one to boost the SEO of your blog.
One benefit of this option is that your blog is completely separate from your main website, which may help it seem less promotional since it’s not directly connected to your product. (Although arguably, one of the benefits of keeping your blog and website together is that the thought leadership on your blog increases the credibility and trustworthiness of your brand and its products.) While it’s a limited benefit, hosting your blog on a separate domain can also offer a way to pass some link-building SEO juice from your blog to your main website. The only difference between the two is that a sub-domain will allow you to set up your blog as slightly independent from the main website (though still contributing SEO advantages), which gives you some additional flexibility regarding the blog’s layout and design.
C - THE SWITCH
If you’ve been hosting your blog on free URLs like Blogger or Typepad, you are going to have difficulty switching it over to a blog that you host and keeping the search engine traffic and page rank your blog has achieved. If your blog is on blogspot.com, Google does not let you do a 301 redirect from your old Blogger site to anywhere else. (A 301 permanent redirect is how you set up a clean forwarding address from your old site to the new one.) That means that Google does not let you redirect the SEO value to a new site.
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