|  As anyone will tell you, setting up a business blog is an important aspect of developing an online presence for small businesses. Blogs create a steady stream of traffic and fresh material for both search engines and human visitors alike, and with proper SEO techniques they can be a powerful way to boost a website”s PageRank.
However, simply putting up a blog under your company”s name doesn”t take you all the way. A lot of businesses these days hear about the importance of blogs and jump on the bandwagon without figuring out how to properly integrate the blog with their website, and as a result they lose out on a lot of the potential traffic that would usually come from those blogs. An example of this would be publishing your blog on an entirely separate domain from your main website. Some companies even try to cut budgeting corners and publish their blogs on one of the many free blogging platforms peppering the internet. Taking either of these routes is a crippling mistake that will put a damper on the effectiveness of your blog.
Aside from the obvious SEO complications, your brand itself will also suffer. When a customer or visitor on your website clicks on a link to go to your blog, most of the time they”ll expect to stay on the same domain. When that link takes them to a different domain, or worse, to wordpress.com or blogger.com, they might get confused because of the unexpected transition. If they land on a free blogging platform, they may even see your brand as unprofessional because you aren”t even willing to pay a few extra dollars a month to host slot machines your own content. There”s a lot to be said about the reliability of a site that hosts their own blog, even if it”s only a face value perception.
There are three simple ways that you can keep your blog integrated with your website to fully enjoy the benefits it has to offer.
Host Your Blog on a Sub Domain
The best place to put your blog is on a sub domain adjacent to your own site. For example, if your website is www.mysite.com, the blog sub domain would appear as www.blog.mysite.com. This keeps everybody in the same place, and allows you to perform off-site SEO for a single site as opposed to two.
Host Your Blog in a Website Folder
Alternatively, you could place the blog location in a folder on your website, with the end result appearing as www.mysite.com/blog. From the user”s perspective, this is identical to the effect created by a sub domain.
Use a Similar Domain
Finally, if you really want to set up a separate domain for your blog, it helps to keep the URL as similar as possible. Using the same example, this might look like www.mysiteblog.com. You will run into the problem of setting up viable SEO for both of these sites, but you get the added benefit of having two domains, which can be used to link with each other, thus increasing your backlink power.
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