Blog for SEO: embedded in the site or separate

[BobGW]

Hello,

For both ecommerce and sites that sell services, I've seen a lot of people recommending a blog for SEO.

Should this blog be inside or separate from the main website for the most results?

I can see how adding one to a site would create more unique content and an opportunity for link bait, but perhaps there is a reason to have a blog separate from the main site

Thank you.

[john4math]

Add it to your site.  You want people to know the blog is part of the site, and you want people to be able to get from your site to the blog and vice versa easily.  Also, you want your site's rankings to benefit from the traffic you bring in via the blog, and vice versa.

To make it be treated as part of your site, you should set it up under a URL like mysite.com/blog, vs. blog.mysite.com.  The subdomain approach will get your blog treated like a new site.

[junioruf]

Weikelbob,

Personally, I would do the following for e-commerce sites: Create a blog using a popular platform (which gives the client ease of being able to add their own client), where you are capable of changing the background to match the websites look and feel (this all depends on the client and how they want their blog to look). Once you create the blog and it's design is as requested by the client, link it to the website by adding a blog button to the header, footer or main navigation (you do want people to find your blog and to add comments and for them to share it with their friends). The blog should have a domain of the site followed by the name of the blog or just blog: "http://domain.com/name-of-blog" or "http://domain.com/blog".

Also, if you have a facebook page, you can add the blogs feed into that page (there are apps for it).

Hope this helps!

[AdoptionHelp]

Without a doubt add it to the main site under a folder like /blog. As John Barth mentioned, using it as a subdomain will pass all the domain authority value to the subdomain and not your main site, so its functionally equivalent to hosting it on a different domain.

[Alex-Harford]

I agree that it's better to add it to your own site. What if people like your blog and link to it, but it's not on your site? You've lost some link juice there. You can submit it to blog directories too - more direct links to your site. For ecommerce sites there's a lot of content duplication with other sites when the same products are sold, so like you say in your last sentence, a blog adds regular unique content.