On-Domain Business Blogging is Best for SEO
By Mike Hallaron
HallaronPR.com and MH1webdesign.com
If you follow our business blogs for web design, social media, or public relations you know I am a big advocate of using business blogs to create useful content and important backlinks to your website. The number of customers or other blog followers is slightly irrelevant because we are more concerned with the search engine crawlers indexing the blog content and noticing the rich backlinks taking them back to your company website. In a nutshell, that is where the value of blogging comes into play from a SEO/marketing perspective.
Understanding On-Domain vs. Off-Domain Blogs
You have many options for setting up your business blog. Blogspot.com aka Blogger is owned by Google and allows you to set-up a simple blog in minutes with free hosting. The most popular platform, Word Press, also offers free hosting for your business blog without many plug-ins or the same extent of flexibility and control offered when you choose to host the Word Press blog under your own website hosting.
The key is that you want your actual blog posts (stored in a database) saved under your own hosted domain, aka “on-domain” hosting. This will afford you the greatest search engine optimization value.
So always select to host your Word Press blog under your domain. The blog articles and images will reside within your hosting root directory structure meaning the Google crawler and others can access and index that content for SEO and ranking purposes. And that is the name of the game. As a result, your blog should look something like this:
This is the precise reason to avoid the free Blogger platform for your professional business blog. It is especially true if building brand awareness and website backlinks and search engine ranking are your driving motivation. At this time. Google’s Blogger platform can only be hosted through their free “off-domain” package. Therefore, your blog address will appear like this.
Note Google offers so-called custom domains so “blogspot” will not appear in your URL address. However, it is still not hosted under your website. So skip it. This will not enhance your SEO efforts.
How On-Domain Blogging Will Boost Your Marketing
Here are the best reasons to use on-domain blogging as with the hosted Word Press platform.
- Search engines crawling your site and hence the blog will spider your blog content as though they are new, useful pages within your parent domain or website.
- Other blogs, directories and search engines will crawl your updated blog posts and link back to these pages.
- Each new blog post will include relevant keywords to your work and industry so Google and other engines begin to push your website up further in the organic rankings. This is what we call your search engine presence or on-line brand awareness.
Summary:
If SEO and increased organic search engine ranking are not a priority for your business, then there is no harm in pursuing off-domain blogging. If you can only blog off-domain, I suggest that you evaluate your organic placement for your off-domain blog separately from your website.
If your blog shows for your keywords on Google.com then I would consider continuing to blog off-domain and point links to your parent website in your blog posts. You can still drive traffic to your website using anchor links in your posts.
If like almost all of our clients, you are pursuing a business blog to build search engine presence and brand awareness for your website, then only spend time and money on blogging on-domain. You will soon see the payoff in your marketing results.
Please call Hallaron PR for an initial discovery meeting to learn how a business blog built in Word Press can enhance your marketing plan.
Toll free (877) 354-5898
Houston/The Woodlands (713) 429-1746 or (281) 362-2884
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