Where Do I Host My Business Blog?

Why Blog?

Blogs are a great way to communicate with prospects and provide valuable information to them about what you do,  how you do it and convey the image you want to project. A blog can also be a powerful marketing tool for bringing in new visitor traffic from search engines, article syndication/feeds as well as referrals from social networking and bookmark sharing services. Posting regular articles on your blog which have been written to include important keywords and keyphrases can help bring in visitor traffic to your articles from search engines. Especially if you write about current hot topics that people are searching for.

Blogging for Backlinks & Improving PageRank

Some website owners operate a blog with the aim of including links on it back to their main website in order to improve their business website rankings on search engines. With its patented PageRank algorithm, Google in particular gives a boost in rankings to sites with high quality backlinks from other closely related sites.  This is especially true if those sites are themselves well linked from other closely related sites.

With this in mind, website owners often will set up a blog on free blog hosting services like Blogger or WordPress. Alternatively, the blog may instead be hosted under its own domain, like http://myblog.com/ and the blog is then linked back to the main site.  The expectation is that it will help a corporate site rankings. While on the surface this may seem like a clever backlinking strategy, this approach does not take into account one of the most important and most often overlooked caveats of PageRank - that the backlinks must be of high quality in order to be effective and yield a boost in rankings. One of the things that determines link quality is the number of other links pointing to the site (or blog) on which the backlinks are located. If you place links from your blog to another website but the blog does not itself have a large number of high quality links pointing to it from other sites those links to the main site from your blog will yield little benefit.

That is a fatal flaw with this strategy. The smarter option is to instead incorporate the blog as part of your main website, under the same domain, such as https://www.techwyse.com/blog. This approach has many advantages.  Some examples include:

• By hosting the blog on your main site, new articles constantly add new relevant content to the site, which will be appreciated both by visitors and by search engines.
• An on-site blog can transform your site from a static, unchanging “brochure” into a place with fresh, new content that invites user interaction – all in one spot.

Finally - the most important reason! If readers enjoy your articles and blog enough to link to it from their own sites or share it on social networking/bookmarking services, then all of those inbound backlinks will be pointing directly to your site.  This in turn gives both your site and your blog the boost on search engines that you were looking for in the first place.