Best Company for SEO
Your blog should be the centerpiece of a larger initiative, one that engages your target audience in a "human" way, with the goal of creating signals that will aid/support what you're trying to achieve with SEO.
One mistake many businesses still make is creating posts that consist of self-promotion with little "meat" to entice anyone to engage with the content, much less share the content (in the hopes that you might earn a link or two, or any "viral" activity to the post, whatsoever).
What Are You Trying to Achieve?
One of the first things you have to consider is – indeed – what you're trying to achieve. How you answer the following questions will guide one of the most important steps that you'll take when setting up a blog:
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- Do you have issues with reputation management – i.e., negative brand mentions in the search engine results pages (SERPs)?
- Are you trying to build thought-leadership for your company/brand?
- Are you trying to build a channel to drive deep linking to specific pages of your website?
- Are you trying to build depth of content or develop a tool to target "human queries" for your otherwise "corporate" website?
- Do you want your blog to be non-branded and/or seen as a unique "unbiased" voice in your industry?
Setting Up Your Blog
Once you know you're trying to achieve, you need to consider where the blog resides. Should you use a subdirectory, a subdomain, a completely separate domain, or either WordPress or Blogger? Let's look at all the options.
Blog on a Subdirectory
More often than not, this is how I recommend clients set up a blog. In my opinion (and "yes", SEOs will have varying opinions on this), adding fresh content to the root domain is a good thing. I also believe that having an RSS feed of "latest blog posts" to the home page of the website is a good thing.
I believe that promoting content that resides "on" the website is a good thing because you can earn (deep) links and provide balance to your link profile. And, I believe that having thought-leadership content that is closely associated with your brand (resides, again, on the domain) is a good thing.
Pros:
- Add fresh content to the root domain.
- Add deep links (from other websites)/social signals directly to root domain (assuming that you've promoted this content well).
Cons:
- Won't provide an additional "brand" listing (in most cases) in the SERPs, so doesn't serve well for reputation management.
- No direct ability to get links "from another website/sub-domain".