Blog hosting: where and why.

The real benefit of hosting a blog and maintaining it has been a quick way to spread your business and its brand across the internet. 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.

Once you make the concious decision to start a blog, your first big quandary is where to setup your blog: on your own website or via a blogging service. Each one has its own advantages that will help your website. However hosting as part of your main domain, can be a disaster or the act that propels your business to the moon. There are factors to consider in each case so read on and find out more.

So where do you host your Blog;

There are a couple of ways you can host your blog, either by creating an account on the blog platforms like Blogger or WordPress or simply installing your Word Press 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 the blog as a tool.

There are search engine ranking benefits to hosting the blog yourself.

Setting up the blog as a sub-domain on your existing website adds benefits to your websites search engine ranking. Any new content that is added to your blog will be treated as new content as if it was part of your main website. Every new blog posts that you create is easily and quickly indexed and far quicker 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.

There are also Backlink benefits to self hosting;

If you spend some time and efforts on writing quality contents on your blog, you can attract quality backlinks as other bloggers link to posts in your blog. If you host your blog on your main domain then as in SEO, these back-links will benefit your main domain. If your blog is on an external blogging service, then they reap that benefit, not you, and not your main domain. However, you will still get the benefits if you are able to pull the page rank and links from your separately hosted blog to your main website by cross linking. But, in order to get benefits via cross linking your blog will need to be successful. How you may measure success will be different from the Search engines.

Brand targeting;

Business website owners may choose to start a blog on a completely new domain. This can help if you wish to differentiate between the branding of your website and that of your new 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. This is a wise choice if on start-up the blog is less successful. As this success developes, you can then associate that blog with your existing brand for maximum effect. This would then add Kudos to your blog and could explode its popularity further.

If you wish to enforce your brand instead of creating a new one, installing a blog as a part of your main website can help enormously, as the blog becomes a portal to the inner workings of your company. How many CEO’s in US industry have personal blogs as part of their Branding effort: Yes you got it – lots of them. Its because its an effective branding model in todays economy. If the 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 within your main site.

Technical aspects are crucial;

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 relative ease.

Diferential costing of both systems;

most reasoning for setting up an external blog outside of your main company website domainis the possibility for using one of the many available free online blog hosting services such as Blogger. Most leading social networking websites such as Facebook and of course the new micro-blogging platform, Twitter, 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 a compex technical infrastructure.

So, decide where to host your blog. Take into account the factors around branding, cost, technical expertise and the platform of choice. WordPress is by far the most effective and widest available. WordPress in my opinion is far superior in both functionality and diferentiation, there are standalone platforms that still use WordPress as abasis but they cost around $300 and are technically challenging to organise.

However you decide, only you can make that decison based on your circumstances and intent. But the best and most effective route in my opinion is host your own, because then you truely “OWN” the blog. Find your groove and start talking. Its theraputic and you will eventually succeed.

Have an opinion, comment and share that with the world.

Have a great weekend and come back again.

Technorati Tags: Back Links, Backlinks, Blogger, Bloggers, Domain Name, Internet Audiences, Page Rank, Platforms, Quality Contents, Search Engine Marketing, search engines, trafficsecrets, Visibility, Web Pages, Websites Search, Word Press, wordpress