Social Media B2B

The inbound search benefits of B2B blogging are easy to understand and you are ready to start. You have read our post about Business Blogging Best Practices, but there is one small piece of the puzzle that you don’t get. How do you setup a corporate blog? This is not a technical post, or even a tool based post (although self-hosted Wordpress is the best choice, as it gives you the most control), but I will offer several options how to configure a corporate blog and discuss each approach.

1. Host on Your Company Site at /blog
The most common approach to hosting a corporate blog is to create a /blog directory on your company site and host the blog there. Since you are creating the blog to drive traffic to your web site, it does make sense to place your blog within the context of the site. If your blog links are part of the main navigation of the site, it is easy for site visitors to find the blog from the web site and it is easy for blog readers to find content on the web site. If your posts are titled with industry keywords or other terms your target is looking for, your posts will be found by search, but you are missing the full power of onsite search engine optimization through the full URL. Unless someone is search for your company name and the word “blog,” all you have is the post title to drive traffic.

2. Host on Your Company Site at /keyword-phrase
What if you did everything the same as in example 1, but if you are an email provider, you named the directory /best-email-practices? This means that the full URL for every post contains the term best email practices. This adds a lot more search power to every single post because it contains a phrase that people are searching for. There is no search value of the word blog. This way you still get all the benefits of the blog being incorporated into the navigation of the site and making it easy to find information on the corporate site.

3. Host off Your Company Site at fancyname.com
Some blogs have fancy names, like Thoughts Spilling from Our Heads, which they host at thoughtsspillingfromourheads.com. Does this contain any keywords? It may or may not include a clear connection to the web site content. Nobody is ever going to find this blog through search. This is an example of being too clever. Social media really needs to drive traffic to your site, and generate leads. It is not about showing off how smart or clever you are. Next.

4. Host off Your Company Site at keywordname.com
It is a better idea to call your blog Business Accounting Advice and host it at businessaccountingadvice.com. The only advantage this has over example number 3 is that domain name itself has good search value, when coupled with well-titled posts containing relevant content will drive more traffic. While there may be reasons to do this, and one might be a stubborn IT department that won’t set up your blog directory on the corporate web site, a separate blog is not the best way to optimize your site for search. One of the things that influences search engines is traffic to a site, so driving traffic to a directory on the main site helps search traffic on the whole site.

No matter which approach you take, make sure that provide links from one place to another. For example, you may have a great keyword based name of your blog, but you host it at /blog. While you may want to change the name of that directory (and redirect all the old URLs), you should register the blog name and forward to the blog at its location. If you go the other way and host the blog on a separate, make sure you provide an easy link from the home page to the blog and that there are links from the blog back to the home page.

Have you considered creative approaches to configuring your corporate blog? And do you have any off the wall blog names that you rejected or have come across? Let us know below.

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