Hello All things being equal, is it better for an e-commerce site (technology w/ 250 products) to have blog directly on the site or have a separate blog which links to the site? Again, all things being equal---ecommerce site is fairly new (about 6 months) thanks in advance for your response
Hi, I recently set up a blog for my site and set it up after reading Inbound Marketing by Brain Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (I don't know them and have no connections with them, but it's a good book). This is a summary of what they recommend: 1. It's imperative that your blog not include the name of the platform in its URL, for example: ___.blogger.com, or ___.wordpress.com. This builds authority for Blogger, or WordPress – not your company. 2. We recommend having your blog address (URL) be 'yourcompany.com/blog' or 'blog.yourcompany.com'. 3. Another option is to register a new domain for your blog based on your topic rather than your business. However, managing this separate brand can be a fair amount of work and you'd be building SEO authority for two domains. I read somewhere that Google is quicker to index the 'yourcompany.com/blog' option because it is part of your existing domain (which is already indexed), but that Google is improving with sub-domains and will eventually treat them in the same way. You might want to do some more research on this. I chose the 'blog.yourcompany.com' option. Good Luck Paul
Both have benefits and short-falls. Onsite, you will get indexed quicker (probably), and it looks smarter. Offsite, you get much more value from links to your main site, and more traffic as you have twice as many domain names. All in all, it depends on what you think having read my post, personally, I would go for onsite.