Where Should You Host Your Blog?

When the topic of blogging comes up in a marketing strategy discussion, without fail, "Where should I host my blog?" is the question that follows.

I have spent a good amount of time researching the topic from top industry experts including Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal from Google and other reputable SEO experts. Should your goal be to improve your search rankings, then the following summary review should help you reach your own conclusion of where to host your blog.

As with any business decision where time and money are to be spent, being clear about goals and priorities will help answer the question of where to host your blog. Along with those goals, I encourage a reality check between what is intended versus what one can actually accomplish. No, I’m not being a naysayer, just providing a reality pinch. But don’t put it off much longer—now, more than ever, blogging is important to your search results.

Blogs are a great idea for many reasons: improved SEO, improved community building, improved credibility for both the website and for the company, and now with Google’s Freshness update—I would venture to say that blogs are critical to SEO. But blogs are slow to grow in terms of subscribers and require additional work to market them if you have hopes of gaining subscribers. That means additional work for you or your team after all the hard work to create valuable, useful, and/or entertaining content. The estimated time to gain traction is anywhere from six months to a year. But to be honest, do you need a lot of subscribers, or is there a particular audience of readers that would be more beneficial to your business?

There are four options as to where you can host your blog.

• A blogging site such as Blogger or WordPress
• On a separate domain all together
• A sub domain of your primary site
• A sub folder on your primary site

Using a blogging site

The fastest way to get a blog up and running, especially if you don’t have the in-house skills to load a blogging platform on your existing site or your current server won’t support a blog platform, is to use one of the blogging services such as Blogger (owned by Google) or WordPress. Recently, Tumblr, a platform resembling something between Twitter and a traditional blog, has taken off and gained a vibrant and active community.

Another positive side to blogging on these platforms is that you have the opportunity to gain visibility with the community of bloggers who already use the platforms. Those communities take time to reach out to and nurture—and you’ll need to spend time commenting and sharing their blogs in hopes of them reciprocating. Well worth the effort if you are looking to grow a subscriber base.

Another challenge with these sites is that often they are set up to have links as nofollow, so they won’t offer much value back to your primary site.

Blogging on a separate site

Some SEO companies recommend creating a blog on a separate website with a domain name that has a keyword or two in the URL. They suggest this as a way to create back links to your primary site using keywords. For most of you, this is probably a hogwash solution and I wouldn’t recommend it unless your current hosting server doesn’t support a blogging platform. I say hogwash because if that other site has no traffic, doesn’t rank well, and is written as a disguised spam site, those back links are useless. So long term, I don’t believe this tactic will prove to have any value.

The only thing that I see that might prove helpful is using the long tail keywords and those are hyperlinked back to your site. This might help you to own that keyword string but again with that blog site being of low rank there is no guarantee it will deliver at all. The time frame to test would be at least six months to see if the site gains any traction.

With a blog on a separate domain name and URL there is the opportunity to create a different brand and the flexibility to write potentially more outrageous link bait than you’d otherwise want to. It can also offer up the opportunity to create a community around a topic or issue encouraging participation from those who might otherwise hesitate if it is associated with a particular company or brand. For example, if you can get others in your industry to blog on topic, they might be more willing to do so if the site is neutral and not a competitive site.

You could conceal ownership, and try to use the separate domain to drive links and authority to the main site, but there are drawbacks. First of all, good luck getting an entirely new site ranked in less than six months. With the amount of time, effort, energy, and possibly money spent in the meantime, you can decide if it is worth it.

Blogging on a subdomain

There is the option to blog on a subdomain to your primary site, and even possibly on a different server if your current web host can’t accommodate a blogging platform. Your primary site’s host might be a secure server or a Windows server with no php support. Or you might have a CIO or technical team still too paranoid to open the site up to possible hackers.