A Blog as a Secondary Website
If you already have a primary website that is performing well for your small business, establishing a business blog as a secondary website is an acceptable approach.
You can benefit from the powerful “traffic generating” advantage from a blog without having to disturb or disrupt the effort and investment you already have in your primary website.
Consider two common secondary blog approaches:
- A blog as a separate secondary website on a different domain from your primary website, or sub-domain of your primary website
- Integrate a separate blog into your primary website, without converting your “traditional website” to a blog platform.
A blog as a separate website on a different domain
This gives you the flexibility of choosing a different theme, look and feel and possibly even a different focus from your primary website. Most likely, you will link back to your primary website from the secondary blog website. However, people are often under the misconception that many links from the secondary blog back to the main site will transfer the search engine ranking power and traffic generating juice all the way back to the main site. This is not actually the case. The first link back to the main site will carry and transfer some of that traffic generating influence, but additional subsequent links will have diminishing returns.
You can certainly create links back to your primary website and send physical traffic back to your main site when visitors to your blog click and follow those links. You would accomplish this by creating reason and incentive for your visitors to follow links back to your main site. For example, you may have a key article or white paper back on your main site that you direct people to visit from a relevant post on your blog.
But be careful if your purpose for creating a business blog is to directly influence the off-page SEO factors for your main site, a single off-site blog isn’t sufficient to make enough difference. If you want to achieve better search engine ranking and traffic generating performance for your main site, you’ll be better off placing your blog on your main site.
A blog on your primary website
If traffic generating influence is one of your primary objectives for your blog, then a better solution is to put your blog on your main website. If your hosting platform permits, you can install a blog on your primary (same domain), and build smooth integration to the blog from your primary website navigation, typically via a menu item or link.
This is different than making your primary site a blog itself. That’s the subject of our other category, “A Blog as a Primary WebSite“.
The two approaches from a domain perspective are either a sub-folder or a sub-domain on your primary site:
sub-folder —> mydomain.com/myblog
sub-domain —> myblog.mydomain.com
There isn’t any clear advantage to either approach (sub-domain or sub-folder). The search engines, including Google, will usually treat page listings from a sub-domain as part of the main domain. So it’s generally easier to keep it simple and use the “sub-folder” approach.
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