enabling technology

How will my blog get the biggest SEO for my buck?

A quick comparison of the SEO and branding impact of a self-hosted vs free-hosted blog 

The business of blogging is powerful, and it has a direct impact on your company’s exposure, as well as search engine findability, which has the ability to directly impact your sales.

How you build and structure your blog will have an effect on how easily people can find you on the Internet.  There is somewhat of a science involved in driving web traffic your blog, and if you’re going to take the time to write and post, then you want to do it in such a way that gives you an opportunity to gain competitive advantage over the many other bloggers in your space in terms of gaining readership and new visitors to your blog.  Therefore, your blog site’s ranking in search engine results is very important to your business.

Some nuts and bolts questions our clients ask us: What is the best approach in terms of a self-hosted blog vs. a hosted platform?  Which one will do the best job of offering good search engine findability?

This first option refers to hosting your own blog, and having your own domain, while the second, also called a “free-hosted” blog, is offered through a service such as Google’s Blogger or Wordpress.com.

While both, actually, are comparably high powered in search engines, they do have their differences, and we have a preference for one that will offer you more opportunity to promote your brand and boost your SEO.

Advantages of Free-Host Platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress.com

• Easy and simple to design and customize
• The service is cheap and immediate
• The solution is out of the box: If you don’t have time or don’t know how to set up your own blog, you might prefer to have a third party run your blog, so you can concentrate on posting to it
• SEO value: Apply some of the more simple SEO optimization techniques and the blog will do well in achieving high search engine rankings

If you’re just getting started and don’t want to delay with the technicalities of getting up and running or maintaining your own site, then a free-hosted blog is for you. 

But the second option, owning your own domain with a self-hosted blog, will provide you with more control over its structure, and this is where you can impact your SEO.

Self-Hosted Blogs:  Why We Like Them Best

Branding

The branding benefits of owning your own domain are fairly significant.  When you create your own domain name, you are more easily found and remembered.  By contrast, with a free-host blog, you become a sub-domain of the hosted blog platform. For example, it will be easier for people to find you at wesellgidgets.com vs. wesellgidgets.wordpress.com. Your own domain name is better for building your own brand identity.  Register a great domain name and support it with your blog content and themes.

With a self-hosted blog, you also have more control over customization features, which will allow for more control over your branding.  It allows you to publish a more original look versus selecting from a handful of templates as offered in the hosted blog solutions.

Better Functionality

You have the ability to utilize optimization techniques that are not offered with a free-hosted service.  Here are a few examples:

• Plug-ins: Allows you to add to external RSS feeds, widgets, videos and slideshows, plus offers tracking and bookmarking functionality so you can keep tabs on where your readers are coming from and ping them from other sources, such as Twitter, when you post new content.
• Categories: Build categories to support your themes and overall branding. You have the ability to make categories for your postings, which gives you an SEO edge for your theme-related content.  By the way, most blog writers leverage a main theme for their blogs. The nature of a blog’s flexibility allows bloggers to easily add more themes and tie them together, enabling a blog to support several strong themes.
• Trading Links: Trading links is good strategy, and you can do this easily with a self-hosted blog. If your business blog is separate from your company website, more people will be willing to link to your blog than if it’s connected to your business site.  If your blog posts are interesting enough to get the attention of other bloggers who will link to you, then that will tend to elevate your blog higher up in the ranking scale. 
• Link to Yourself: Another option is to have your blog attached to your company website, and in this case, any new content on your blog will improve the search engine ranking of both your blog and the attached website.

 Cost & Making Money

Some bloggers argue that owning your own domain is cheaper in the long run than it would be to use a free-hosted platform and add on the comparable features.  The investment, then, is in a longer-term strategy for expanding and promoting your blog. There’s also a “making money” factor with a self-hosted blog. You have the freedom to place ads or include paid posts without Terms of Use restrictions.  Thus, with the ability to run your own ads, it provides you with another element for drawing in an audience to your blog. 

Launching your own blog is best practice. Users face fewer issues with a self-hosted blog because they have the control and freedom to design and manage it as they please.  You’ll also realize higher SEO rankings by taking advantage of the flexibility in branding and promotion.

Either way, get on with the business of blogging.  Post often, stay on theme, and give your readers quality content to keep them interested and willing to tell others about you.

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