In the debate of whether or not you should create a blog inside your main website, or create the blog externally and link back to your main website, there are many pros and cons, and much discussion has arisen on the web in SEO forums around this topic. In general, the advice tends to trend towards embedding the blog inside your main website, but here are some of the reasons for going either direction.
Creating the blog outside of your website may have some SEO benefits, if the blog exists in a large network (such as Blogger, Blogspot, Wordpress.com, etc.) as those sites tend to be indexed more frequently than other sites, allowing for greater freshness of content for the blog, and increasing the blog’s page ranks faster than it might in an embedded blog. Inbound links from an external blog will lend that higher SEO ranking to the main site – however, it is also the case that this is a game of diminishing returns, as links beyond the first back to the main site are weighted relatively lower (the second link is worth half the first, the third is worth half the second, etc.) so over time, this is a strategy that will not lend a great deal of SEO relevance to the main website. If you are creating a new domain for the blog, external to the main website, that network benefit is of course lost, and you are forced to build the SEO relevance of the blog on top of building the relevance for the main site as well.
One larger reason to creating a blog separate to the main sites, is if the blog perspective, mood or flavor is sufficiently different from the main site you are trying to assist with the blog in SEO (if, for example, you are looking to blog as a personality / individual, but want to keep your company’s website at a higher level of professionalism than what you might post in your blog). Keeping the separation between the two sites will increase the perception of authenticity for the blog (and perhaps increase inbound links due to this factor), but again, the benefit to the main site is going to be limited over time. Unless you are trying to perpetuate the personality of the blog as a separate brand, many would argue that the benefits of inbound links to good content is better served to contribute to the main site through embedding the blog.
It's 3:42 AM, Christmas morning, and even though it is the case that I am Jewish and do not celebrate this particular holiday in a religious sense, I come from a family that does, and therefore this time has it's own nostalgic sacredness to me. It's been storming all night long, and I've been in the living room in my pajamas catching up on tasks for work.
When you own your own business, it's hard to let go and give yourself the vacation that you give your employees, or even expected and took for granted when you yourself were an employee, but the truth is, in the quiet time created by a lack of external pressures and client attention, the entrepreneurial mind wakes up and starts to tackle the creative tasks and administrative menialities both that one never seems to have the time to handle in the day to day. The truth is, these days those that run a small business are running with a tight belt and are overworked, and it's only in the quiet moments that the pressure seems to decrease enough to let the mind wake up and remind us why we went into business in the first place.
For me, what is percolating in the noggin, other than the bills I have to pay and the payroll I have to make sure gets out, and the fact that I'm taking a short (sorta) vacation next week at the beach with family, is how I should make sure to get a post in for Christmas, because there are lots of queries on Christmas, and it's a good time to try to pick up some relevance in traffic. Sound mercenary? Well, perhaps it is, but the truth is, if people are reading my post, then I guess I'm relevant to them, and however I get in front of their eyeballs is just fine with me.
Hello, Joshua here.
I wanted to take a moment and report on an experience I had this week with a client that seriously kicked me in the behind and made me think long and hard about making sure that one's own house is in order, especially if one is a house-builder for others.
I'm sure everyone's heard the expression 'the cobbler's children have no shoes', and it describes the phenomenon that so often happens with service-oriented professions, where what you provide (and often with excellent quality) to others, you somehow fail to complete or fulfill for your own personal needs. Plumbers have leaky sinks, mechanics' cars don't run, house painters' houses are in need of a new coat, etc. On one level, this is totally understandable, because if you're in the business of doing service 'a', it's always more motivating to be doing that service for pay then doing it for free. Also, in most professions, you can get away with it.
Blog 
Click here to subscribe to the Target Practice feed with a feed reader
