We previously wrote a post about a competing blog writing company (which shall remain anonymous), where we took issue with how their blog writing services are delivered, as well as some of their answers in their FAQ. Below is one of the company's frequently asked questions, and what we think the answer is, versus how this company answered the question.
I don't have a blog right now, should I start one on my site, or should I just start one on blogger.com, wordpress.com or one of the others?
The blogging company is correct in saying that it doesn't matter, but the reasons why it doesn't matter are completely different from what they say. Here's what they say, and why it really doesn't matter whether you start the blog on your site or on a free blogging platform.
Business Blogging is Great for SEO. Period.
First, they say that starting it on your own site means that you will have to work harder to for the search engines to find your site. Absolutely not true. If there's one thing that actually makes it easier for search engines to find your site, it's regular business blogging. The reason is that when you start the blog on your own site, you are adding pages to your site. That's more pages for search engines to index, more pages that search engine users can find, and more opportunities for your to come up in results. All that sounds like its easier for search engines to find your site when your blogging in general. Where the blog is started does not affect the difficulty of the blogging or in getting search engines to find it.
Second, the blogging company argues that if you build it on a free blogging platform like Blogger or Wordpress, then you need to make sure that every single post includes a link or two back to your site. Although that's true, there's a way to have your business blog on the free blogging platform without having to include a link in every single post (not that including a link is a bad idea. The bad idea is relying almost entirely on that linking for search engine rankings.) That way is focusing on the domain name.
It's the Domain Name that Matters
What would make it harder is if the blog is under its own domain name (www.mycompanyblog.com), or if it's on the free hosted domain name that comes with Blogger or Wordpress (www.mycompanyblog.wordpress.com), instead of part of your company's domain name (www.mycompany.com/blog). This is a huge point that the blogging company fails to mention. When the blog is under its own domain name or under the hosted domain name, then all the SEO credit the blog earns will go to that domain name and not yours. Sure, you can include an inbound link or two with strong anchor text in every post as a way to get your website to rank, but it doesn't make up the gap that is in between your website and your blog. Those pages aren't added to your site, so they aren't counted as fresh content on your site. If people find those blog posts on search engines, they don't necessarily find your company or site, and you have to hope that the potential customers actually clicks on a link or two to your site.
The domain name issue is much more than getting the SEO credit, it's also getting the inbound links, which this particular blogging company offers as its bread and butter. If you have the blog on the hosted domain name or its own domain name, and it's a great blog that's earning inbound links on its own because people like the content, then you and your site miss out on all those inbound links because they are linking to the blog and not you. In this situation, you could be losing referral traffic as well as high quality inbound links from a variety of places, instead of just getting a ton of inbound links from the blog. If inbound links are what you are after, then the optimum scenario is to have a lot of inbound links from a lot of high quality sites. This is one step above having a lot of inbound links from just one or two high quality sites
Business Blogging Help: It Helps to Have One
It's really simple to have a blog that on a hosted platform to share the domain name of your company. This may be the default option for businesses whose sites are already hosted on these platforms, as adding the blog is as quick as adding a new page or feature. However, the bigger point is the that the blog and the blog posts ought to be used to earn those inbound links, as well as an easy to way to create links back to you, instead of just the former. That way, you're number one goal becomes creating great content, instead of creating content that will please the search engines or will rank well
