Search engines love content yet some of the best content that you, as a blogger, are generating may not be benefiting your primary website. I’m talking to all of you bloggers who have hosted (ex. yourblog.wordpress.com; yourblog.blogspot.com) as opposed to self-hosted blogs (www.yoursite.com/blog). Sure, you might have a link to your blog from your primary site but, as I’ve often seen, your blog may not present a well-integrated path back to your main website. This, I believe, is a mistake. Your elsewhere-hosted site may be generating thousands of visits but those visitors may be missing all of the other good stuff that’s available at your main site.
I can easily illustrate this with my own site… Of the thousands of visits I receive a month, over 80% of these enter through my blog posts. A significant number of these visitors make their way to my other, non-blog content pages – if I had my blog hosted elsewhere I’d be losing all of that search engine juice.
I can’t tell you how many businesses I run into with perfectly good websites who drive people away from their site to their elsewhere hosted blog – or never drive people to that site if the visit originates at the blog.
So move your blog home and put out the welcome mat for the new visitors you’re sure to reach.
(PS – be sure to leave a note at the old blog telling your old visitors where to find you and include links to your new feeds for those who subscribe via RSS or email. In fact, generate several posts to that effect over a few week span after you move to insure you minimize subscriber loss.)
