So you’ve decided you want to blog about your business. It’s a good move. A blog can really help you get the word out to a new audience. It can help you strengthen your relationships with existing customers. It also helps to increase your rank in the search engines. One question you’ll have to answer right away though, is whether you want an on-site or off-site blog.

All this refers to is whether you want your blog to be part of your existing website. If you want your blog to be a link off your existing website, that’s an on-site blog.

Lets examine these scenarios one at a time. Both have their advantages. My personal disclaimer is that I recently switched my website to WordPress, so that I could utilize the advantages of an onsite blog. It just made sense for me.

The Advantages Of An Off-Site Blog

Link building is the major advantage to having an off-site blog. Quality links from other quality websites are a major part of a business ranking well in the search engines. Regularly linking back to your web page from your blog can go a long way in accomplishing this.

This strategy can work well if you have a large website with lots of quality content, apart from the blog. That way you’d have a lot to link back to from the blog, and your website should already be doing alright for content. In this circumstance, having two high-powered domains can also provide more visibility for your business around the web. This is how you come to dominate with more than one listing on the front page of Google for various, important searches.

Having an off-site blog can also provide a clarity of purpose. When your blog is on its own domain, it’s right there and easy to find. Some businesses bury their blog too deep into their own website, making one of the most useful business tools too hard to find. There’s no confusion with an off-site blog, and if you provide informative, entertaining content, your blog won’t be muddled with your commercial purposes.

The Advantages Of An On-Site Blog

Like I said earlier, this is the type of blog that I recently switched to. I made the switch because I wanted my original content to carry more SEO weight. Though I’m always adding pages to my existing site, it’s not terribly large, and I felt I could benefit from the indexed content that a blog brings.

When you regularly produce original blog content, it can raise the profile of your commercial operation by giving it more prominence in the search engines. Since switching to WordPress at the end of August, my freelance writing business has climbed in the search engines.

Content is king. That’s a phrase thrown around a lot in the marketing profession. Google and the other search engines highly value quality, original content. When you regularly include keywords in these blogs, it makes a lot of sense to create a system where those efforts reward the ranking of your entire web presence.

Recommendation

I’d recommend having an onsite blog for all businesses, except for the rarest cases.

Here are some times where an off-site blog might be better:

• If you already have hundreds to thousands of pages of content
• If you regularly produce industry articles and white papers on your website
• If your site is loaded with a wide variety of products or services(hundreds to thousands) and you have unique content for each product description.
• If your blog content is going to regularly be unrelated to your industry (Even in this case, I’d recommend writing a personal blog, and a business blog, separately.)

Unless your site is just dominating without the blog, there’s just too many benefits to be had by producing regular, quality content right there on your business website. It’s a great way to attract the attention of the search engines and build a relationship with your readers.

Matt Brennan is a Chicago-area marketing writer and copy editor. He is also the author of Write Right-Sell Now.