Internal Vs. External WordPress Blogs, which one to choose?

I needed some clarity on what the best methods to use are when creating/updating a company blog. There are a few factors involved before setting one up before deciding which one is actually best for your site.

As we all may or may not know, blogs are a good source of information and back linking into your site from your blog posts it builds your site’s credibility on the Internet – which is important!

Test carried out
I wanted to test whether using an external blog was better than using an internal blog. I started by creating one blog externally using one of WordPress’ domains and later added one internal blog to my actual site. Both are using WordPress so the only different factor is the domain which the blog is hosted on.

Findings
I found that the external blog was ok, but Google only picked up my post changes every month around the same time. This is fine but you obviously want your posts picked up ASAP, especially if you want to promote something on your site quickly.

I then added an internal WordPress blog a month later, which is on my own domain. WordPress gives you the files to upload; it does require some technical knowledge as you will need a MySQL database.

I then also added the XML sitemap add-on that WordPress provides; this is a must, as it tells search engines when you actually make the changes within the blog and what pages to crawl.

I found that the internal WordPress blog posts were picked up by the end of the first week in Google, which was fantastic. One obscure phrase that I knew I could get fast ranking on was my site name – which was also included in my domain. By the end of the first week the internal blog was already ranking above my own site for its own site name!

Summary
Neither of the above methods is perfect, but there is a third way to structure your blog. I have come to find that this third way is the best method as it:

A: Lets Google pick up your posts faster.
B: Improves your site’s ranking

Here’s what you need to do
Firstly, you need to create a new domain, something like [www.companyname-blog.co.uk]. Then upload the Word Press files onto this domain, get everything set up and use your new blog domain to link back into your main site. That way it will help your sites rankings, and all changes to posts will get picked up a lot quicker.

Something I have left out is back link building, this is also crucial to the blogs credibility! This I will cover in a later post, so make sure you check back soon.