COMMENTS
you can actually use your own domain with TypePad blogs - its a pretty simple process called "domain mapping".
Hi MIke,
Thanks for the helpful post. I have a follow up question... We have a blog that we started on Wordpress that we now want to brand. What do you recommend is the best way to leverage this existing content?
What we're thinking is to get a new domain and point it at the wordpress site. This way, we could start building some brand equity and backlinks. We realize we wouldn't get any love from the backlinks pointing at the existing wordpress blog (at least we don't think so). Do you see any pros/cons for doing it this way?
Otherwise, I suppose we'd have to get a new domain and point it to a new sever/host. With this option, we'd have to somehow migrate the content from the existing Wordpress blog to the new one. This seems like a potential nightmare (unless Wordpress offers a transfer plug in).
Thanks again for all the great info!
I really wish I would have had Mike to consult when I was making this decision for my company blog,
www.theb2blead.com. Originally the blog was a folder in our corporate site but we wanted to make it distinctly clear that it is a thought leadership blog and not a sales pitch. We soon moved it to its own url. While I think we did gain points for differentiating it from the corporate site, Mike is right that it is a lot of work to build inbound links. In retrospect I think I would have made it a subfolder of our site. The point of starting to blog was of course to help boost SEO but more importantly to position ourselves as thought leaders. We have seen great response to our posts but I fear many of our readers don't even realize it is a corporate blog. Is that a good thing?
Leigh, you say "In retrospect I think I would have made it a subfolder of our site." I think you meant subDOMAIN, right? By the way, I took a look at your blog... interesting stuff. And I LOVE the Marketing-WTF category (How do you not end up putting every post in that, lol?)
You're right, I did mean subdomain. (this only goes to show how lost I am with the more technical side of blogging) I am better at the fun stuff like Marketing WTF? on my site. I think I could probably have a blog that was solely dedicated to that topic.
This is good stuff, Mike, but I would take exception with #2. Search engines are actually treating subdomains as independent units, not part of the main domain, and you face the same hurdles with building links, overcoming trust factors, etc., as you would with a new domain. From a purely SEO perspective, #3 is the best solution, as links to your blog and main site all benefit the same domain.
@ginevra - you are correct. You can use your own URL and still use Typepad or Blogger software. As I tried to point out in the note at the end of the article, I am not trying to say the software is bad, just the free URL that they offer.
@Tourque Screwdriver - You are right that you have no way to regain any of the inbound link power to your Typepad URLs. It is lost forever. I would put it on a subdomain of your current website, or a new URL. If you want, you can just set up your current Typepad account to use this new URL. You should not have to migrate anything if you like their software and don't want to switch to something else.
@ Leigh Anne Wallace - The choice you are talking about really comes down to branding. Do you want the blog to be seen as separate? Or do you want to use it to promote your company more directly? My bias is that smaller companies have limited resources and should focus on supporting as few brands as possible. At HubSpot we have decided to have the blog be under our brand, but always have the content be non-promotional, and just valuable, free content targeted to our audience. And PS - I am happy to help you with any of the more technical aspects of blogging or SEO or Internet marketing whenever you want. I just sent you a Facebook friend invite (at least I think it was you).
@Matt McGee - You are absolutely corrrect that it used to be the case that subdomains were treated as being very separate from the main website. However, because of recent changes, this is no longer the case. See these articles:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/015621.html
http://searchengineland.com/071207-090257.php
So, I really think that if you are setting up a blog today there is not a big SEO difference between choosing a subdomain or folder. I prefer the subdomain for personal / optical reasons. And, sometimes it is a tad easier to have blog on a subdomain too since it is a bit easier to have your blog hosted elsewhere or use different CMS/software from your main website if it is a subdomain.
By the way, I took a look at your blog... interesting stuff. And I LOVE the Marketing-WTF category
Great article. Wished you had written this one earlier. I have recently read about a lot of people complaining about losing their blogger and wordpress blogs without warning. I can understand that some blogs have violated their TOS but I do know of several good blogs that had good and original content lose their blogs. You can avoid these kind of heartaches by running your blogs on your own domain and hosting.
yes I agree with (marketing man0 but still this article give me some points :)
I think it's always best to brand yourself with a unique website and if you want to have different blogs as subfolders of the site. Then at least while you're tweaking and changing things you can still retain ownership of your material and associated brand.
After reading this article, I've decided to move our blog to a Sub-domain on our site. Thanks for this. It's gems like this that keep me going online!
@pete - The nofollow on blog comment links is pretty standard. If you don't do that, you get a TON of blog comment spam.
I realize it's pretty standard. Some blogs I post to don't have it which is nice. For some reason I thought yours didn't include it. No big deal though... Thanks again for the great posts!
Mike,
Great post! I concur with Leigh Anne that I wish I'd had this info when I started.
As you can see from my website link, my blog is hosted on Wordpress. It's worked well so far, but as I've reached more readers I've wanted some independence from Wordpress. I searched for the leadonpurpose domain the other day but someone beat me to it (it's parked free on GoDaddy.com).
Since I'm not in a position to host my own site yet, I've thought about a few different URLs I could use (Wordpress allows you to use your own domain similar to TypePad) and wanted to get comments from you and your readers on my idea. What do you think about adding "blog" into the domain name? I am considering leadonpurposeblog.com. Thoughts?
thanks,
Michael
Michael,
I wouldn't lose too much sleep over your domain choice from an SEO standpoint. That is, you're not going to try and leverage SEO juice from your domain name. Sometimes people put their keyword into their domains (eg, BuyNikeShoes.com) and by the nature of people linking to them, it helps them rank for the phrase "buy nike shoes."
So, whether you use whatever.com or whateverblog.com, you're developing a brand that will need to draw traffic from quality link building, and of course, providing killer content that can't help but get shared ;0)
While it is a nice thing to host your own blog and it may be in Hubspot's interest to promote moving blogs to many folk who don't have the ability to take this on themselves. My thoughts are that blogspot at http://www.blogger.com offers a great free service with lots of nice enhancements for blogs hosted at blogspot. These simple free widgets cannot be hosted if the blog is hosted on your own site.
The most important component of your blog is indeed the feed! By getting a free account at feedburner.com you can own your feed and move it at any time you move your blog, so subscribers will never lose you. I think it is important in the interest of full disclosure to give the easy do-it-yourself solutions if possible. Mike, you also glossed over the topic of subscribe by email, which is also a free service that is available at feedburner.com . . . granted, you've got a service to offer, but for the do-it-yourselfer, there really isn't anything wrong with hosting the blog on blogspot.com... in fact, I've seen very good search results for these blogs in Google. . . . so it's not an SEO issue either.
@Todd - Maybe I wasn't clear. It is not a question of what server the blog is hosted on or what software is used to power the blog. It is ONLY a question of the URL. I am OK with people using Blogspot software and having their blog hosted on Blogspot servers. You can use whatever software and widgets you want. But it is essential for a business blog to have its own URL. Not a URL that is part of a different company. So, for your business blog, I really do think that if you want to use Blogspot software, you can. If you want to host with them, that's great. But the URL of the blog should not be on blogspot.com. Your own URL costs only $8-10 per year. It is a trivial investment.
For instance, it is not possible to redirect mikevolpe.blogpost.com to mikevolpe.com. So, all of the links (SEO value) that I have built for mikevolpe.blogspot.com can never be passed anywhere else. If I ever want to upgrade/change my blog software, or if blogspot.com gets shut down, etc., then there is NOTHING I can do. If I had just used my own URL (even with blogspot software and hosting) I would have a lot more options open in the future.
In short, on the web the links to your URL is something of value to your business. As a business you should want to own and control the things that are valuable to your company. If you use a Blogspot or other free URL, you do NOT have control over it, and that is just a really bad idea for all the reasons mentioned in the article.
@Todd -
For instance, your blog is at Tourismkeys.ca, and appears to use Blogspot software. That is totally fine. If some day there is some other cooler blog software, you can actually move your blog.
If your blog were on tourismkeys.blogspot.com, then you could not.
So, you are doing what I recommend!
Mike,
Thanks so much for all that you share. I watched your blogging webinar this week, and wanted to ask a question that didn't get answered there:
In our case, while I pushed hard for #2, or 3 (subdomain, or /blog directory of our main site), technical issues forced us into #4 (a seperate URL altogether).
You've mentioned here, and in your webinar, that this is an acceptable as long as we understand the challenges we create for ourselves. I'm not sure that I do--or if I do, I'm not sure I know how to overcome them. Could you share with us what steps we need to take to leverage the SEO juice of our blog site, towards getting our main site to rank?
I hope that makes sense? Again, thanks for all your advice (this feels like a "dear abby" column for bloggers :)!
@Craig - Basically, you now need to do a full SEO program for TWO websites, instead of just one. For starters, you should link to your blog using the right anchor text from your main website.
Thank you for pointing to your article! I didn't even think about TOSs, moving content and other horrors.
Hi Mike, regarding the subdomain. I'm considering creating my website based on wordpress's CMS. What I want is for the blog's URL to be separate from the main URL.
for instance main website URL(http://www.bla.com) and blog URL2 (http://www.blu.com). can this be done withing the same CMS or would I have to have two separate hostings for each domain. Or just create a subdomain (as you have) for the blog and redirect it to URL2 so that it appears as that.
what do you think? Thanks Mike.
I use blogger.com and host it on my site. It can be found at
www.crookedmonkey.com/blog.html. But when i use websitegrader.com it tells me that my site does not have a blog?? How do i rectify this, and is my site not reaping the "rewards" from having a blog?
@Jorge - I am not a technical CMS expert, you'll have to figure out how to have your blog and website on the URLs you want. the key is to just not use a Free URL you don't control.
@Micha - Website Grader is not finding your blog because (1) your RSS feed is not discoverable on your homepage, (2) the link to your blog does not contain the text "blog" (it is an image, so website grader can't see it) and (3) even on your blog, the RSS feed is not discoverable (automatically by a browser)
What do you consider as the most SEO friendly CMS to use for a blog?
I run the website for a retail wine shop. I have a blog at Blogger that is replayed? on my web site. I'm not certain how it's being done, but the posts "show up" on my website, in my website template. At my website the URL is the awful
http://www.67wine.com/main.asp?request=Blog (but I have a nice big button on every page) vs. the actual address of 67wine.blogspot.com
Are we getting the SEO benefits we should be? Is there a better way to do what I'm doing now?
@Guy - I think the best business blogging software comes fom HubSpot, but I am biased. It has served us well so far with thousands of subscribers and great SEO results - search Google for "Internet Marketing Blog" and we're usually toward the top of the first page.
@Paul - You are getting some of the benefits, but you are not getting them all. Your blog on blogspot has all the same content as your website, so your website is just mirroring the content of the blog, and search engines are generally not fans of duplicate content. If you want to contact us, we'd be happy to talk to you more and also do a few reports about the links you have, your rankings and a few other things.
I recently ran the website of the company I am working for through HubSpot's Website Grader Tool and the report recommended we start a blog. That was a sign we had done something wrong, because we already have one! It's set up in the "blog.hubspot.com" format on Wordpress. From reading your post, it must be that we didn't properly link the site to the main domain. Any suggestions on how I should ask our non-SEO-minded web designer to link the blog so it appears part of the main domain?
Ild like to start a blog and have it stem from my website. Can I do this rather then sign up for some blog program (like blogger). Is anyone familiar with frontpage 2003 and if its capable of creating a blog that will just be an extension of an existing website?
You're right. It's about branding. Using a Blogger blog or an AOL email says a lot about you as a business owner--and not what you may want. When you're talking about SEO, you have to be in the driver's seat with total control.
I was lloking forward of this coz i agree that one of the major reasons to start a blog is to drive more links into your interesting content, and leverage those links to move your company higher in SEO rankings, and having your blog on one of these free URLs pretty much negates these benefits. You have a nice blog,keep up the good work.
by: ricka
Thank you for this post! This is a question that I have been wondering about for awhile. It is so important that if you are taking the time to develop a blog that you are maximizing the SEO benefits. I am glad to know that my instincts were right!
Hi,
With social media marketing, there is an assumption that there is already involvement with the social communities involved - profile(s), network of friends, content submission, voting and participation. That’s the big mistake most marketers make when trying to promote products and services on the social web. They’ll create an account on a social media site, put up some content and expect the social media world to be their oyster without having built a network first.
I would prefer making a sub directory for a blog. I would not want to spend money to buy a new domain and waste money and time SEOing the site.
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James
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Regarding the subdomain.i agree that one of the major reasons to start a blog is to drive more links into your interesting content, and leverage those links to move your company higher in SEO rankings.
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