Should Your Blog "Live" on Your Firm's Domain or a Unique Blog Domain?

I gave a How-To Start Blogging session yesterday (deck & handouts in my next post) and received this question afterward:

Q: 

Do you recommend hosting your blog on your firm website or linking from your site to [external] blog sites such as blogger/wordpress?

A:

It really is fine to do either. There are some strongly polarized opinions on separate versus apart, though, and I try to keep an open mind to both sides of the argument. 

A WordPress site (or MovableType) that is self-hosted can usually be hosted on the same server with your standard website. As long as the host can accommodate MySQL databases (GoDaddy, for instance, can). 

When you self-host, you have the option of hosting the blog on its own domain (www.yourblog.com) or as a subset of your firm's url (www.yourfirm.com/blog or www.blog.yourfirm.com). Even if you choose the subset, you can buy a domain (www.yourblog.com) and point it to your firm.com blog url. 

The key difference will be the URL for your individual blog posts. As an aside, blog post URLs, just like your website URLs, are better for you when they contain the words in the title of the posts (versus a numeric string)--this can usually be designated in the blog set-up screens. 

Some considerations in making your choice are: 

Is your firm's URL already long? 

If so, you might benefit from picking a short blog domain and hosting at that domain so that you don't lengthen an already long URL by naming your blog in it (e.g. www.blogname.reallylongfirmurl.com/blog-post-url-that-is-the-same-as-the-title-of-the-post) <--you could cut out the "reallylongfirmurl" part. 

Associating your firm's URL with the content of your blog. 

If the blog post URLs are "housed" on your firm's regular website URL (either via actual hosting, or via "domain mapping" through a hosted solution's set-up preferences) then you have the obvious advantage of all the SEO (search engine optimization) juice of every blog post word ON your own web domain. This is a clear benefit. 

Creating lots of external links to your regular website.

Alternately, a benefit of your blog being hosted on a domain EXTERNAL to your site is that every single post made to your blog creates a unique "web page" and, in doing so, if your firm name is a link that appears at least once on every page, this creates a TON of inbound links to your firm's website that also benefit your firm's standing in the rankings. Neither approach is "bad" and both have advantages. 

If you host it externally and "pipe in" feeds of recent or most relevant blog posts to your regular site, you can benefit from both.

Comments from others about pros and cons are welcome!

Comments

[Dustin Wheeler]

Michelle, great post. Another thing to consider is the performance of the blogging software on the server. It's not enough that the host can accommodate a mySQL database; you want one that runs it well. I learned the hard way that Wordpress runs very slow on shared Windows server with IIS (so slow that it would take like 30 seconds to load a page). We ended up purchasing another domain with Linux hosting for our blog and the pages load much faster.

[Michelle Golden]

Great point, Dustin! Thanks for your comment. I agree, Linux is essential to good WordPress (WP) functionality. Several hosting companies make using WP very difficult, but it isn't always easy to know this until AFTER you've bought your hosting. Thanks for bringing this up!

BTW, I really like your blog and have added it to accountingbloglist.com!

[Jim Caruso]

Michelle - thanks for the info, but may I ask a related question? Whereas the post focuses more on the technical side of hosting, domain names, etc., what are your thoughts on mixing professional vs. personal content and where both should reside? To break it down further, what about professional topics that are client-facing versus those that are geared toward peers in my profession? I want to start a personal blog that covers topics strictly of personal interest (e.g., fitness, martial arts, weather photography) but also professional topics that would be of interest to others in my profession but not necessarily to clients. Finally, I also want to blog on behalf of my firm with topics that would be of interest to current and potential clients. I assume the latter category should go on my firm's site, but do I also include the personal stuff on there to build a personal brand? If I keep the non-client topics on a separate, personal blog should I in turn separate the two categories into two separate personal blog sites (i.e., strictly personal, vs. what is written for peers in my profession)?

[Michelle Golden]

Hi Jim, great questions!

My answer got so long that I made it my newest blog post. Thank you for the inspiration!