So, here's a question that I'm presented with quite often. "Should I have a blog INSIDE of my website, or get something like Blogger, which is OUTSIDE of my website?" Well, this article will try to give you my take (for better or worse) on the subject.
Wow, what a great question without an easy answer. The first misconception is that having a blog will automatically grant you the golden ticket to search marketing. WRONG. Having a blog is very similar to having a regular website. Google doesn't care that you HAVE a blog, they care what's IN the blog. If your content is crap (non-relevant to a search), then you won't show up in the search engines. Plain and simple. (For hints on writing good content, see my entry called Tips on Writing a Blog.)
For the purpose of this article, we'll refer to an internal blog as one that is within your own website domain (like http://www.mysite.com/blog) and an external blog as one that is hosted by someone else (such as Blogger.com or http://www.blogger.com/mysite).
So, let's assume that you already know how to write great blog content, let's talk about the pros and cons of having an internal vs. an external blog.
External Blog System
If you subscribe to an external blog, chances are really good that you'll be able to find a free one out there. That can be hard to beat! If you have budget constraints, but have a lot to say, you can start blogging immediately - for free! I typically recommend this for beginners.
From the search angle, your blog will be part of a larger blogging network right off the bat. So what? Well search engines are already indexing those sites for content on a regular basis. With very little effort, they'll be indexing your content within days of you setting it up. I have to assume, for the purpose of this article, that you already understand how important this is (if the search engine doesn't index your content, nobody will ever find your articles). So, immediate benefit - you add articles, Google knows about them quickly. Will that help you show up higher in the search? Maybe - if you've written good content. I won't go in to detail, but in many cases, having the blogger.com name attached to your blog can help search engine placement.
Quick overview of benefits of having an External Blog:
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Free
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Easily indexed
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Cool features are all set up automatically for you (with little or no configuration)
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Can usually be exported (if you decide to go Internal later on)
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Can be used to improve traffic on your website (more on this below)
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Built in reporting tools
Quick overview of the drawbacks of having an External Blog:
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Doesn't belong to you (if blogger.com decides to quit, you're out in the cold)
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Your blog won't look exactly like your website - they have themes and templates, but customization isn't really a good option
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Search engine traffic goes to Blogger.com, not directly to your website (more on this below)
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It's quite a task to move a blog later on. If you decide to move to another service, or take it in-house, this will be a chore. More importantly, all of your pages that were indexed in Google will break and disappear.
How Does This Help MY Website?
Wow, so if I can't have ownership of an External blog, how does it help me? Well, here's the key. When you create great articles on an external blog, they will perform in search engines. When you write your articles, you will also use important keyword phrases and link them to your website. I'll use my friend Bryan Williams as an example. This could be a snippet from an article:
Bryan Williams does customer service training and customer service consulting and is extremely effective at it. Bryan has even published his own customer service training videos, which are available for sale on his website.
Ok, so let's see what I did here. Let's imagine that those 2 sentences were a full blown article. The subject of my mini-article is Bryan, but Bryan would have written an entire article about "customer service consulting" (by the way, I have now slyly used this major keyword phrase many times within my own article). Anytime I mentioned a keyword phrase, I also created a link back to Bryan's website. Why is this so important? Well, Now I have an article which is focused 100% on customer service consulting, AND I'm telling people (as well as search engines) that I also know another website that's all about customer service consulting - Bryan Williams' website! This is known as external link building and anyone focused on search marketing knows that this is quite powerful.
As an added bonus, when I write an article about customer service consulting, I might go as far as to include something like:
If your company is looking for a dynamic, talented person to provide customer service consulting, I definitely recommend that you contact Bryan Williams at 240-401-6958, or visit his website at http://www.bwenterprise.net.
This is a more directed approach to just flat out telling people, "HEY- YOU READ MY ARTICLE AND THIS IS WHAT I WANT YOU TO DO NOW!!!!" It's a way of asking for a sale and we all know how powerful that can be.
Internal Blog System
An internal blogging system is one that belongs to you. It's within your website, and if your developer did his job right, it looks very similar to the rest of your website. In my opinion, I see this as a great corporate approach to providing additional content for its customers that is beneficial to them. I choose to write articles to address the questions and concerns of our clients. If you are building your brand and want your blog to be a part of that, Internal is a great way to go.
Internal blogging can sometimes be easier for the novice, because linking is not as important here. If you write great content, and the search engines find it, people are already on your website, so there is no need to direct them to it. However, you lose the external link building capabilities to an extent. You can add links and they are appreciated by the search engine, but they only weigh as much as your website weighs. When you link from an external source, that link has the potential of carrying more weight to it than a link from within your own website.
Quick overview of benefits of having an Internal Blog:
Quick overview of the drawbacks of having an Internal Blog:
Conclusion
When making the decision with clients, I tend to lead them towards having their own blog system if they are larger and / or have branding elements in place. If you are new to blogging and don't necessarily have budget to create your own branded blog, external is a great way to go!
There's a middle ground between Internal and External where you buy another domain, set up a blog on that and point it back to your website. With that approach, you get all of the benefits of an external blog, while also keeping ownership and creative control.
If you need help setting up a blog, please feel free to give us a call at 1-800-759-3670 and we'll work with your company to set up a blog to meet your specific needs.