Off site Blog?

[Dave Kovaleski]

I see many of you do a blog that is separate from your main website. I was thinking that integrating a blog into my site would help the site with new and changing content.

What are the advantages/disadvantages of having a blog integrated into your main site verse having a separate url for your blog?

[frobn]

There are many advantages of having an integrated site but the main advantage is SEO. Many modern WordPress themes are optimized out of the box for SEO and there are excellent plugins like All in One SEO that help armatures to masters tweak their sites. Is it as good as a paid professional? Probably not, but its a good start.

The other main advantage is flexibility. There are numerous plugins even several for property listings management.

The disadvantage is you can easily become addicted to doing all the new things you will find.

[svrpaul]

While rather old -- here is a thread covering that topic:

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/thread18681.html

Pay attention to Ryan's answer on page 4... it's good advice.

[frobn]

While rather old -- here is a thread covering that topic:

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/thread18681.html

Pay attention to Ryan's answer on page 4... it's good advice.

Ryan made an excellent post. I too have seen sights with little content rank high. Now if only we can figure out the magic elixir. Without that though we are left to follow best SEO practices which there will always be some disagreement.

[svrpaul]

Actually... I was referring to this particular statement from Ryan:

You could argue that by putting a blog on your site, you could make it more viral and I suppose that may be true, but, I don't (my opinion) think it is professional to have certain things that you might write for your blog on your website. Take for example this post I wrote here on the REW blog about Trulia. I don't think that is appropriate content for a professional real estate website.

That's why I think for real estate, it's important to have both.

The rest of the thread goes over the SEO thing...

Personally IMO.. a well written blog post that only gets a few visitors will generate more phone calls then a bad blog post that gets hundreds of visitors.

Regardless... it's all better then doing nothing and praying for the phone to ring.

[CLTMichael]

I prefer to have it offsite. In every post you have to come up with good keywords.

In every keyword link back to one of your main sites.

[wpreality]

If you do not have much incoming links to your main site then having a blog offsite can do you a lot of good it you have ONE-WAY links from your blog to your main site.

If you have incoming links to your main site then it is not a good idea to have an off-site blog, since you are splitting content between 2 site instead of focusing on a single site, making the main site more visible to search engines.

Remember there are MANY small sites, and the bigger sites usally get more hits... mostly because they have more content.

This is just a rule-of-thumb and really depends on your content and keyword targeting.

The best combination is to have a blog with a small post and have a more extensive post on the same subject in your main site with twice the text , providing an expansion of the subject.

As someone has already said in the forum....(sorry I don't remember who)..... REUSE! REUSE! REUSE!

[cyberprofit]

There are many advantages to using Wordpress as a blog both on your site and as an external site. The main adntages of having a blog on your site is that you benefit from the favor that Google gives Wordpress.

One caveat: you will have to balance your time when it comes to adding new content to the blog. What I really like about internal blogs is that I get internal backlink credit for each new post that I and it shows Google that the site is active. Externally, you can create a blog and use it for a variety of reasons…namely in your SEO efforts.

If you use an external blog, just make sure to point a variety of strong links to the site from directories and other pages such as Hub pages, Squidoo and article directories and build the site up with as much original content as you can possibly handle in a short period of time.

[cyberprofit]

I forgot to mention, the theme you use is very important for SEO and home page canonicalization which is making sure that the best URL is used amongst the available options such as:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

In this case, they are all considered the same page by Google and could be construed as duplicate home pages.

Your blog should automaticall redirect to the preferred URL.

[devendra3047]

For SEO and home page canonicalization Google provide new tag......
<a href="www.xyz.com" rel="canonical> it reduce your duplicate links