In itself a fine choice if SEO support for your main site is not your goal (which is the case with NU.nl), but if you want to use your blog for SEO purposes, then you should do this differently. The main SEO disadvantage is that you cannot distribute the link value that your blog builds on a subdomain or a completely different domain to other pages of your site, for example the pages that you actually earn money with. In other words: a blog on a subdomain or another domain is as good as useless for the SEO of your own site.
Tip 2: Use your own system
Your main domain already has a system running. An existing CMS usually has adequate news or blog functionality. The difference is often in the presence or absence of reaction options. This is easy to add, either internally or with a specialized system such as DisQus . To rank in Google with a weblog, you don't need many extras. Good HTML templates, popular articles, comment options and a flat url structure are sufficient (see my article from 2007 about this ). You don't need a very extensive blog system with 12948735 bells and whistles for that.
Preferably not. Because if you can use your existing system, it integrates much easier with the rest of your site. Think of user logins, templating, technical maintenance, integration within other parts of the site (because the same database), etc. etc. Your technicians will thank you for it. But so will your SEO!
Learnings:
easy integration of a blog with your existing Content Management System is quite important;
a weblog is actually not much more than a news module with comments (and possibly multiple authors)
your existing news module can usually be easily expanded into a weblog;
If your system already has weblog functionality, then that is usually sufficient and you do not need to run an external system (such as WordPress) alongside it.
Tip 3: Integrate!
If you use your existing system, and place it on your main domain, you can make much better use of the SEO benefits of a blog. The keyword here is 'integration': the blog does not become an external appendage, but an integral part of your site.
Just think about:
scan certain words from blog articles and automatically create links from them that point to your money pages (like Wikipedia does);
do not use separate tag and category pages, but make a product category in your regular site the 'tag page'. All tag links now refer to a product category (if you have a webshop for example) instead of to separate tag pages (which you find in all typical blogs);
show the latest articles from the category on the money pages themselves. This way you refresh the content of your money pages more often;
and more technical: fully integrate the URL structure of blog articles with your site. So not: /blog/article.html, but: /category/article.html. This way, the contextual navigation menu and the breadcrumb can also be used to pass linklove to the money pages of the site.
Tip 4: Determine the SEO content strategy
A very simple way to create structured content is to think of a number of categories that you want to write about and what the goals are for them. You don't have to think about what you want to achieve with every article you write: you do that at category level. Handy for when you're out of inspiration.
Typical things that occur in a blog are:
company news;
press releases.
But also consider:
guest writers/columns;
monthly overviews with filtered industry news (Wiep does that well )
downloadable whitepapers (like here );
calls for user feedback for new features (beta invites, etc.);
giving away freebies and other promotions, such as competitions (mail & win promotions czech republic phone number list are often forwarded via social media);
showing the content of your newsletters (= unique content with promotions that you already have)
Tip 5: Show comments?
The last tip is not so much a tip, but a question. Do you have to allow comments? And if so, do they have to be comments that are placed in your own system or on Facebook, for example?
For example, if you show a Facebook form instead of your own comment form, people (usually) don't have to log in, their comments are posted on their Facebook Wall so that others see them sooner, and you no longer have to deal with comment spam. In addition, user generated content such as comments is often of low quality. You then shift that problem to a social network. Finally, the interaction on Facebook, Google+, or even all social networks at once, is probably much greater than on your own site. That gives food for thought, because what was the purpose of a comment again? Sometimes it is advantageous not to keep comments on your own site, but to move them to social media. That does not even have to be bad for SEO.
Do you have any SEO tips for corporate blogs? Let us know in the comments below.