Search Advisory

Blogs were social media before the term “social media” even existed.  And search engines love blogs — ironically, it’s often easier to get a blog ranked high in the search engine results pages than a regular website (that goes for most forms of social media).  So how can you leverage your corporate blog for more prominent placement in the search engines?

In terms of platform, it’s usually best not to host your blog on a site like Blogger or WordPress’ hosted solution*.  That’s because any links pointing to your blog will benefit Blogger and WordPress more than they’ll benefit your blog or your website.  You’ll get more out of your blog — and have more control — if you own the domain that it’s on and host it.  Which brings us to two options:

Having two domains (www.blog.com + www.site.com):

• Advantage #1:  You can take up more room in the search engine results pages — since each URL can have up to two organic rankings, you’ve just doubled the number of spots your company can take up.  If you get all four listings, you’ve just grabbed 40% of the organic results.
• Advantage #2:   The “link juice” from your blog to your corporate site usually “counts” for more since it’s an external link, not a link from one page of your site to another.
• Disadvantage:  The search engines tend not to trust new URLs, so it can take awhile for your blog to build enough links and history to rank high itself.

Having the blog as part of your main domain (either www.site.com/blog OR http://blog.site.com):

• Advantage #1:  Link juice from other sites will be consolidated — it’ll all go to your corporate site (including the blog), so every inbound link will benefit both parts of the site.
• Advantage #2:   The blog may rank higher faster, since it’ll be part of a website with a history instead of at a new URL.
• Disadvantage #1:  You can only have two organic listings, rather than four as described above.
• Disadvantage #2:  The link juice from the blog to the site usually won’t count as much, so using the blog to build links to the corporate site won’t be as effective.

I generally go with the first option.  If your goal is to take up real estate in the search engine results pages, and boost the corporate site’s rankings through links from the blog, that’s usually the best approach.  Tomorrow I’ll cover best practices for optimizing blog content and building in effective links to benefit the corporate site.

*Wordpress’ solution that allows you to host your own blog is what I recommend.  It’s the most search engine-friendly option available.