The real benefit of hosting a blog and maintaining it has been a quick way to spread your business across the internet audiences. It has been proved by the search engine marketing specialists and bloggers in the past few years that a blog can benefits your website or business in very effective ways.

When you decide to host a blog on your website, the first question that comes up is where to setup a blog on your own website or separately. Each one has its own advantages that will help your website.

Where to Host Your Blog on Own Website or Separately?

There are two ways you can host your blog, either by creating an account on the blog platforms like Blogger or WordPress or simply installing your own blog software on your own website. Hosting a blog as a sub-domain of your own website looks like a professional approach and often preferred by those who want to boost their website ranking on search engines using blog as a tool.

Search engine ranking benefits

Setting up the blog in as a sub-domain on your existing website also benefits to your websites search engine ranking. Any new content that is added to your blog will be treated as new content part of your main website. Every new blog posts that you create are easily and quickly indexed than regular web pages. It thus helps promote better indexing and visibility of your main website, if the blog is hosted on the same domain name.

Backlinks benefits

If you spend some time and efforts on writing quality contents on your blog, you can easily attract the quality backlinks using those articles. If you host your blog on your main domain then all back-links will benefit your main domain. If your blog is on an external domain then back-links will not be directly passed on to your main website. However, you will still get the benefits if you are able to pull the PR and links from your separately hosted blog to your main website by cross linking. But, in order to get benefits via cross linking from your externally hosted blog it will need to be successful.

Brand targeting for business owners

Some business company’s or website owners can choose to start a blog on a completely new domain name. This can help if you wish to differentiate between the branding of your website and that of your blog. If the blog you are setting up is not directly related to the content on your main website, then you may not wish to combine the two on the same domain name.

If you wish to target on enforcing a collective brand for your company rather than creating a new brand for your blog, installing a blog as a part of your main website will help. If a blog is installed in a sub folder of your existing website, the blog URL will include your primary domain name in the address bar and appear as a cohesive entity.

Technical resources

If you are setting up a blog on your main website or domain name, you will require a certain level of technical skills in order to install the blog and add the database. If you are starting a blog using one of the free blog platforms then no software installation is required and a blog can be set up in a few easy steps.

Cost benefits

Another common reason for setting up an external blog outside of your main company website is the possibility for using one of the many available free online blog hosting services such as Blogger or Word Press. Most leading social networking websites such as Facebook also allow users to set up their own blog using their website platform. These services are usually free whereas setting up a blog on your main website or private domain name will require web hosting space and technical infrastructure.

So, decide your own where to host your blog, if it’s similar to your website and hosting it to boost your search engine rankings then definitely host it as a sub-domain of your own website.

Posted under Blogging, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization

According to Wikipedia, Link popularity is a measurement of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a particular website on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In simple words, link popularity is the factor which is measure by the quality backlinks pointing towards your website.

In the search engines, Link popularity acts as an important part to get the visibility of a website among the top of the search results. Therefore, all the search engines expect at least one or more links pointing to a website, or else your web site will drop from the search engines index.

Some major search engines like Google uses a unique link analysis system to remark the web pages. The viewpoint of link popularity is that major and important websites will draw huge links and the sites whose content in not so good may not be able to attract the links. Link popularity gives more weight on the quality backlinks and not the number of links.

Search engines think that if your website is good and has any value, then other websites should link to you. If no one links to your website, it means that something is wrong with your site. If the number of links pointing to your website is more then your chances of popularity, authority and relevance is high.

Except Yahoo, all the other search engines factor link popularity into their algorithms though, it is calculated differently. As Google gives weight on the quality of the links, Yahoo measures it on the total number of backlinks pointing to your website. Google and the other search engines are interested in providing the most relevant and topical information for search queries at the top of the SERP’s because this increases the chances of the searcher finding what they are looking for and thus amplifies the perception that the particular search engine provides relevant and applicable websites for search queries.

Link building is a very specialized task which needs a good knowledge of the link building, where and how to find and build high quality links.

A booming link building strategy includes: directory submissions, both general and niche, internal blogging links, linking to business partners or local businesses, social bookmarking sites where you can get good backlinks and writing good articles and press releases that can get your website some high quality links. A link building strategy encompasses all the available mediums online, from social networking sites to the traditional directory. Link building is not only about requesting links but it is about developing a strong brand and websites to which the key online communities want to link to.

Posted under Search Engine Optimization