Setting up your new company blog. What’s best for SEO?

​Creating a company blog can provide value for visitors seeking more information about a topic, and more importantly, can maximize SEO for your website.

​When it comes to SEO, there are two key areas on which to focus — on-page optimization (optimizing your web pages and site code for relevant keywords) and link building. Building backlinks to your website is important because search engines use the quantity and quality of the backlinks to your website as an important ranking factor in the formula they use to rank the sites that show up in the SERPs (search engine result pages). By setting up and company blog and posting quality content, people who read your posts will be more likely to link to your posts if they see value in them, and feel that they would be of interest to their own readers.

​Before you start building backlinks, what’s the best way to set up your blog?

When you (or your web developer) set up your blog, make sure to set it up in a subfolder of your domain instead of as a subdomain — www.yourcompany.com/blog instead of blog.yourcompany.com. Putting your blog in a subfolder means that links back to your blog posts will count towards your whole site’s link popularity.

1. Register a new domain for your blog (www.yourcompanyblog.com)
2. Put the blog in a subdomain (blog.yourcompany.com)
3. Put the blog in a subfolder of your main website (www.yourcompany.com/blog)

For search engine optimization, hosting your blog on your own domain will have the most benefit. Remember, the #1 SEO benefit for setting up a blog on your site is the backlinks that you get to your blog posts. If you set it up as blog.yourdomain.com, the search engines see the subdomain as a separate site entirely, and your blog backlinks will not add to the overall link popularity of www.yourdomain.com.

Search engines don’t only measure the number of backlinks you have to your website’s homepage. They also count the number of backlinks you have to the subpages of your website, including your blog posts. Having more backlinks to your website’s subpages helps to increase your deep link ratio.

If you were to use a hosted blog service like Blogger (with your blog at yourcompany.blogspot.com), this would have minimal benefit to your main website SEO.

In discussions on where to host a company blog, some people recommend a two-pronged approach — signing up for a hosted blog service as well as installing blog software on your server. Don’t.

That would double your workload, as you’d need to have unique content for both. You wouldn’t want to duplicate posts on each blog, as this would result in duplicate content, and you’d also be splitting potential backlinks to posts between the hosted blog and the one on your domain.

For any questions regarding SEO or setting up a company blog, contact our team of experts.