What do you see as the best way to position articles that support your business?

I know that all too often that I make decisions based on being a webmaster instead of from the point of view of a prospective customer. Sometimes what may make the best sense from an SEO point of view may not be the most effective when it comes to old-fashioned marketing techniques.

I am thinking of making some changes to my marketing strategies on my business site. It has been a little neglected of late and I plan on adding a great deal more article content. (Several of my past clients have mentioned that particular articles helped them decide to hire me.)

The questions I have relate to where to place that content - on the business site directly as static pages (there are some articles like this already), on the business site as a blog hosted in a subdirectory or subdomain, or as a second site that inter-links heavily to the first (I have a domain with some age on it that I could use for this).

Now that you know why I am asking these questions; here they are...


Do you find it better to place articles directly on your site as static pages or as a blog in a subdirectory or subdomain?

I realize a second site gives the primary site backlinks and other SEO goodness but how do you think that impacts usability?  If you were a prospective customer would you bother to travel to the second site?

If you see an interesting blog that keeps referring to another site/business do you, as a prospective customer, see that as too slick and used car salesman-like or do you visit the business site if you like what you are reading? Again, think like a customer and not a jaded and cynical webmaster. (I'm thinking of making the heading read something like "The official blog of..." rather than stuffing links and name mentions in every post.)


I was looking at another writer's off-site blog last night, what surprised me was how little he mentioned the name of his writing business or the name of his site. When he did refer to his business, it was usually by the initials. Out of the three months of entries I scanned, only one mentioned the full name and it did not provide a link. No where did I see an active link to his business site. Seems like this was a lost opportunity. Why make people hunt for who you are? Do you have any ideas when this would be a good strategy to employ?


Any other comments or suggestions would be most welcome.

Hmm, no comments by anyone. I had hoped this would make for a good conversation as well as help me decide what to do. So, I'll guess I'll just keep talking to myself here and see if anyone wants to chime in.

It would seem keeping the blog on the same domain makes it easier for branding and link building. But, then again having it on a separate site allows for the two sites to help each other SEO-wise and provides two opportunities to rank in the top ten for key phrases.

My biggest quandary is whether or not prospective customers actually travel from a blog to a business site or vice versa. I know that I have looked at someone's business site if I thought their blog was worthwhile. Has anyone else done that?

I think most of the web designers and programmers here have their blogs on a separate domain. Care to share why you decided to go that way?

I wouldn't go for two sites when the level of affiliation is so obvious. I mean it looks strange to have one business in two sites. SEO should not bother you in this decision as this will probably slow down conversions. You can use a subdirectory for your case studies, and write additional content as guest blogger to other blogs or even create a separate site to add a few articles (just for SEO)

Thank you Nikolas for your input.

I'm not sure what you meant here, "SEO should not bother you in this decision as this will probably slow down conversions." Are you thinking folks won't leave the blog to visit the primary or that prospects would travel to the blog and lose focus of why they had been on my site in the first place?

Have you seen anyone using the .com version of their name for their sales site and say the .info to post information about that business? I suspect it would in some ways make things confusing but in other ways it would appear to have a bit continuity that way.

It does seem that I am able to get better results SEO-wise with articles on static pages than in my blog. Several of the articles already on the site do quite well. My main worry is that as the list of articles gets longer that they will begin to look like an article directory or RSS-feed generated content - neither of which would seem like an asset.

I think that it would be strange for the visitor to see a pitch page somewhere else and the buy page on another site that belongs to the same publisher.

I would suggest to have just a few good examples in your own site and keep it focused on sales. The rest content can be easilly distributed to other sources and help in seo, traffic and exposure in general. There are many blogs out there that would love to have a guest post from a proffesional writer and this would be a win-win situation. For example think what would happen if you could give an article to sitepoint or copyblogger. Of course those are in general sites that you can not easilly give content, but why not giving it a try?

Contents of the article links to a large number of construction is to create a better traffic