Should Your Website Link To Your Business Blog?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, August 24, 2007

Krishna De over at Small Business Branding made an excellent post yesterday on three mistakes to avoid when building a business blog. I’d say there are more than three mistakes to avoid, but the ones she chose to focus on are:

• Not branding your blog
• Not connecting your blog to your corporate website
• Not adding an About Us page on your blog

Granted, these are three mistakes to avoid on your blog, but I’d like to expand a little bit more on the second mistake - connecting to your corporate website. Here’s what Krishna had to say about that:

if you have a corporate website make sure that you have a link from your website to your business blog. I do recommend that this link is not just a hyperlink to your blog which is authored on a separate platform.

Understand that there are different levels of “connecting.” You have two options when it comes to your business blog: You can put it on your website domain and treat it like all of your other pages (i.e. put a link in your menu bar to the blog), or you can put it on a separate domain name so that it isn’t connected from your website at all. I’m using the word “connected” in that last sentence in a non-hyperlinking sense. Notice that I said “connected from,” not “connected to.”

It starts with defining the purpose for your blog, another mistake business bloggers make. If you don’t have a clearly defined purpose for your business blog then you likely will not meet that purpose. Your blog will not stay true to itself.

The purpose can and should define whether your blog exists on your website or on a separate domain name. After that determination is made then you’ll need to decide whether to link from your website to your blog. I highly recommend that you put a link to your blog in your menu bar if the blog is on your website. But what if it’s not? What if your blog has its own domain name and is a “standalone” entity, existing separately from your company website? Should you link to it then?

I’ll say it depends. You should link to your offsite blog from your website if your blog has a specific and special branding purpose that ties itself to a particular product or service you offer on your website and your blog is being used as a sales or marketing tool with regard to that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t link to the blog from the website. However, I would always - and I mean always - link from the blog to the website.

The reason for this is because you want to close your sales on your website. Your blog is great for branding, for marketing, for promoting certain aspects of your business, and even for handling some customer service issues. It’s a great way to get a discussion started in a non-threatening atmosphere. Due to its social nature, your offsite company blog can get the ball rolling on building positive relationships with future customers. But you still want those customers to go to your website because that is where your “rubber meets the road” message is.

If you successfully use your blog to start the conversation you can drive traffic to your website and keep the conversation going with each web page of your website acting as a sales tool. Another benefit to doing it this way is for link building purposes. Your offsite blog can link to your website, each blog post linking to a separate page on your website. Because it is on a separate domain name, the search engines will see it as a separate website related in topic to yours. Each inbound link to your website will then count as a relevant link and with the proper anchor text you will drive the PageRank of your website higher and achieve higher rankings in the search engines for your important keywords. This is an ancillary benefit to branding, but one worth considering.

Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.

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