Wedding photographers know the value of a blog – an ongoing photo diary of your events and sessions. One of the biggest mistakes of blogging, is the simple decision of what should the blog domain/URL be?
Here are the options: (** = recommend, see why below)
- companyblog.blogspot.com or companydomain.wordpress.com (third-party)
- companyblog.com (separate domain)
- blog.company.com (subdomain)
- company.com/blog** (subdirectory)
I can’t emphasize enough how this simple decision of choosing what domain/URL you choose will help in your marketing. Too often do I see option #1, where the blog URL is not branded or helping in your search marketing (SEO) efforts. That’s why it’s FREE people, cause you give all the benefit to Blogger (Google) or WordPress.
Wedding photographers are generally small to mid-sized businesses, so we can use all the help we can get online in the search engines. How can we help ourselves? We can help by attaching the main domain to a directory of our website (option #4). Google sees all other options as ‘separate’ websites and therefore all link love (the currency of the web) will not be attached to your main domain/website. The more link love we can get, the better! Link love can be defined as outside websites pointing to your blog post with a link, saying “hey, this is a great resource, check it out!”
Are there exceptions, OF COURSE! You’ll find at theWebguru the Tokyo SEO agency that when it comes to web marketing and SEO, the common answer is ‘well, it depends.’ If you’re already an authority online, having a separate blog URL can also help by being #2 if your main website is #1 in a Google search result.
As a rule of thumb for photogs starting out, this simple decision to include your blog on your main website domain is a smart one.
Additional Information from my search marketing friends at Audette Media, Where to Put a New Blog?
very interesting article ! more informative thanks for sharing.
Now I understand why you set up my blog in that format. Great info!