There are many ways to start and support a business blog, but to make your efforts productive, consider how your blog fits into your overall site.

Unfortunately, many business blogs are not truly integrated into a corporate Web site. They look like an afterthought, and optimization efforts suffer as a result. The very best business blogs look like they belong to the site they support. They’re as much a part of the site as the home page is.

Should you run a blog that’s completely separate from your main site? If you’re really committed to
achieving blogging results, optimization is going to be hard if your blog isn’t integrated into your web site. Having a second, separate blog site will double your work, slow down the links back to your main site, and it will probably leave your customers looking for confirmation that your blog and your Web site are really related.

Optimization is much easier if your blog is part of your main site. You’ll need to host your blog on your main site, and modify the look and feel of the blog to match your site. It means some extra effort but it’s definitely worthwhile. Making links out to your main site will be easier, and visitors will never be confused about the relationship between your blog and your site.

If you’re already considering a Web site redesign, a third integration option would be to use a content management system. This is a forklift replacement for your entire site, but gives you supreme control over all of the content, regardless of what it is.

Minimally, integrate your blog into your site, which means that you will host it locally, and make it visually like the rest of your site. Understand how your blog fits into your Web site, and integrate it as tightly as possible. By doing these things, you’ll reduce the amount of work you need to do to achieve solid blog optimization, and your customers will appreciate your content without having to wrestle with a non-integrated blog.

Photo Credit: Lucasz Grzyb