When businesses or freelancers decide to create blogs to supplement their websites, one question always pops up: “Where should the new blog be located?” Or in other words, should the blog be integrated into the preexisting website, or should it reside in a subdirectory, a subdomain, or on a completely new domain?

As you can imagine, the answer to this question is never straightforward. And it depends on several factors such as cost of implementation, search engine optimization concerns, and type of content.

Option 1: Integrated into Preexisting Website

If you opt to integrate your blog into your preexisting website, you will likely have larger development costs than either of the other options, because you will have to modify the existing website. You will also be restricted in terms of what content you can publish, because of the connection with the website.

However there are some great advantages to be had. First, you can use one content management system (CMS) to manage your entire website. And second, you will be able to take advantage of easy sharing of pagerank between pages, as well as increased ability to get traffic and target keywords.

Option 2: Subdirectory

Example:

http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/

Placing your blog in a subdirectory is similar to the website integration option, except that development costs will not be elevated because the preexisting website will not have to be modified, and a separate CMS would be used. You could also get away with slightly different subject matter, assuming that your blog design shows a marked difference between itself and the website.

Option 3: Subdomain

Example:

http://blog.yourdomain.com/

Sometimes subdomains are an ideal choice. In addition to operating the blog as a completely new site, subdomains are great for branding because the visitor can always find the main website.

One key advantage for using subdomains is that they can be used for different topics. For example, our website is about web development. We could create a subdomain called “hosting” to focus on hosting packages, or “print” to showcase print design. And everything would still be recognized as part of “Velvet Blues”. Google does this all the time. It’s main website features the search engine. And its products are typically on subdomains. (ie. maps.google.com, groups.google.com, etc…)

Option 4: New Domain

At times, some people have chosen to place their blog on a new domain. The main benefits of placing a blog on a new domain are (1) the ability to choose a domain which better reflects the subject or keywords, and (2) the ability to create a blog which doesn’t have an obvious connection to your new site with regards to design or content. Some people also argue that a higher pagerank can be achieve by linking back and forth between two different sites.

Why We Chose Full Integration

In our case, we chose to integrate the blog into our website. In many ways, this was the obvious solution. We were already using IntelBuilder Social Media Platform as a CMS, and wanted the flexibility of using the same CMS for both the blog and the website.

What Have You Chosen?

Which option do you think is best? Do you see any obvious benefits for using either of the options?

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